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BR 1702 .B672 1924 


Boreham, Frank, 1871-1959. 
A casket of cameos 











OTHER BOOKS BY MR. BOREHAM 


A BUNCH OF EVERLASTINGS 
A HANDFUL OF STARS 

A REEL OF RAINBOW 

FACES IN THE FIRE 
MOUNTAINS IN THE MIST 
MUSHROOMS ON THE MOOR 
THE GOLDEN MILESTONE 
THE HOME OF THE ECHOES 
THE LUGGAGE OF LIFE 

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL 
THE SILVER SHADOW 

THE UTTERMOST STAR 
SHADOWS ON THE WALL 
RUBBLE AND ROSELEAVES 





A Casket of Cameos 


More 
Texts That Made History 


| By 
F. W. BOREHAM 










ny 


THE ABINGDON PRESS 
a CINCINNATI 


Copyright, 1924, by 
F. W. BOREHAM 


All rights reserved, including that of translation into 
foreign languages, including the Scandinavian 


Printed in the United States of America 


BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 


THE stately lives of noble men, are they not the 
glory of the whole earth? 

They are the streams that, transforming every 
dusty desert into a fruitful field or a garden of roses, 
fill the world with life and loveliness. 

In this book—and its predecessors of the same 
series—I have simply traced these sparkling waters 
to their secret source and fountain-head far up 
among the everlasting hills. 


FRANK W. BOREHAM. 


Armadale, Victoria, Australia, 
Christmas, 1923. 





CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 
I. Gzorce Moore’s TExT................ 9 

II. Davin Brarnsprp’s TEXT............... 21 
III. Srk Ernest SHACKLETON’S TEXT........ 33 
IV. Grorce WHITEFIELD’S TEXT........... A4 

V. CarpinaL NEWMAN'S TEXT............. 57 

WT OM ARKY SABRE SO) LEST iy sycio lun Oil eer ih tate 68 
VET SROBERT (LAMB'S! TENT reed on 80 
VITI. Pritie MELANCTHON’S TEXT........... 92 
LA CRTOHNG BRIGHTS VEX Co ska yig enh 103 
X. Jozy McQumpwHa’s TEXT.............. . 116 
tees ATON SEEK TIN guided fre s taki 128 
PTL SANTASEERESA’S LENT ol eC agi, 140 
MEL SypNBY/DOpELL’s Texr 0c) a: 153 
DN AC RINNE Y GUL E NT Olin uli Sula 165 
OV. ROSALIE JOYCE STREET A. Po 176 
OOY FON OHNI WILLEMS LRoor eu oa aay 189 
XVIT. W. M. THACKERAY’S TEXT............. 200 
XVIII. Countess or Huntincpon’s TextT..... . 242 
XIX. CHARLES SIMEON’S TEXT............... 225 
XX. THomas WINGFOLD’S TEXT............. 238 
XXI. Lorp SHAFTESBURY’S TEXT............. 240 
ASL. Dr. R. OW. DALE's TEXT iy aces sek 26% 


‘ 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/casketofcameosmoO0O0bore 


GEORGE MOORE’S TEXT 


I 


SHALL I ever forget the night on which I looked for 
the first time on the Life of George Moore, Merchant 
and Philanthropist, by Samuel Smiles? I was only 
a small boy at the time, yet the memory of it rushes 
back so vividly upon me that it seems impossible 
that, since then, so many years have flown. I had, 
a few months earlier, made a most sensational dis- 
covery—the discovery of the possibilities of a circu- 
lating library. My schoolfellow, Gilbert Finch, a boy 
of about my own age, had introduced me to a dingy 
little schoolroom, not far from my home, where, in 
return for the modest outlay of a penny a month, I 
could borrow as many tales of adventure as I could 
manage to devour. When I reflect on the hordes of 
cannibals, Red Indians, brigands, pirates and smug- 
glers that I obtained in exchange for that first penny, 
I catch myself wondering whether, in the entire his- 
tory of finance, one solitary copper coin was ever 
made to go so far. In every spare minute, from day- 
light to dark, I curled myself up in my father’s ca- 
pacious armchair and lost myself among the grizzly 


9 


IO A Casket of Cameos 


bears of the Rocky Mountains, the boa-constrictors 
of the Amazon, the wolves of Siberia, the whales of 
the Indian Ocean, the elephants of Africa and the 
tigers of Bengal. I romped through Ballantyne and 
Marryat, Mayne Reid and Fenimore Cooper in no 
time. I wondered how I had contrived to fill in the 
dreary days of human existence before the little 
library was revealed to me. And then, just as my 
fevered brain was becoming one confused jumble of 
Indian wigwams, Arab tents, Zulu kraals, Arctic 
'snow-huts and smugglers’ caves, my father suddenly 
took it into his head that such an unmixed diet of 
wild excitement was not conducive to the best intel- 
lectual development. He urged me to try a change; 
and, from some more sedate library that he himself 
patronized, he brought me the Life of George Moore. 
I glanced through it, but could see no sign of a 
shipwreck or a slave-raid or a scalp-hunt anywhere. | 
Still, I felt that, since my father provided me with 
the pennies that brought me such torrents of enjoy- 
ment from my own library, it was due to him that 
I should make an honest attempt to sample his. I 
read the ponderous volume from cover to cover, and, 
to my astonishment, it filled me with a delight of 
which, in anticipation, I had never dreamed. After 
an interval of forty years, I have read the book 
again, and every incident seems wonderfully famil- 
iar. I owe to that childish experience a penchant 
for biography that has deepened, rather than evap- 
orated, with the years. 


George Moore’s Text II 


II 


This brawling little burn, that winds its way in 
and out among the alders and the willows of this 
green, green valley, is the Dowbeck. It is hurrying 
excitedly down the glen that it may throw itself with 
a laugh into the waters of the River Ellen. That 
glorious old mansion on the hillside—with masses of 
cream-colored roses clustering luxuriantly over its 
walls, and thousands of lilies flecking, like snow- 
flakes, the yew hedge that divides the garden from 
the bowling-green—is ‘Whitehall,’ the home of 
George Moore. The house is surrounded by un- 
dulating lawns, winding walks, well-kept flower- 
beds, and graceful shrubberies. In the old days of 
Border warfare it played a great part in the history 
of the countryside; it even figures prominently in 
one of Sir Walter Scott’s romances. Not far away, 
over the hill yonder, is the tiny village of Mealsgate, 
where George Moore was born. How little he 
dreamed in the old days when, as a poor boy, he 
fished in the Ellen and ransacked the wide chimney 
of ‘Whitehall,’ in search of jackdaws’ eggs, that, 
one day, this magnificent estate would be his very 
own! 

And here is the man himself, enjoying, in com- 
pany with his big bulldog ‘Jack,’ one of those 
rambles of which he is so fond! He is a striking 
figure, sturdy and massive. In his -youth he was 
one of the best wrestlers in the country. His whole 


12 A Casket of Cameos 


aspect impresses you as that of a man of blunt 
frankness, robust character and, indomitable energy. 
His alert brown eyes, eager and penetrating, have 
an emphatically dauntless look. His mouth, too, is 
firm and powerful. His fine head, with its abun- 
dance of curly hair, is set squarely upon his shoul- 
ders. You feel that you are in the presence of a 
strong man and a good one. 


{il 


In his younger days George Moore was a com- 
mercial traveller; and he revelled in the society of 
commercial travellers to the end of his life. In the 
interests of his firm he visited every town of impor- 
tance in Great Britain and America. But the most 
remarkable of his travels was undertaken in his 
forty-fifth year, for in that year he made the greatest 
journey that any man can make. He passed from 
death unto life! The extraordinary thing about 
George Moore is that he did not begin his spiritual 
pilgrimage until he was at the zenith of his powers 
and at the climax of his illustrious career. Before 
his need of a Saviour pressed itself at all urgently 
upon him, he had been ten years married, had be- 
come a partner in his firm, and established his posi- 
tion in life, had been invited by the Lord Mayor of 
London to become Sheriff of the city, had been 
offered an important seat in Parliament, and had 
earned a great reputation for philanthropy. 

The story of his spiritual experience, carefully 


George Moore’s Text 13 


recorded, was found among his papers after his 
death. In the first part of his life, he says, he had 
no time to think. ‘At night I tumbled into bed with- 
out asking God’s blessing, and I was generally so 
tired that I fell asleep in a few minutes.’ “No time 
to think!’ This, doubtless, was his general condi- 
tion; but to that general rule there were notable ex- 
ceptions, three particularly. 

There was one never-to-be-forgotten occasion on 
which he spent the whole night thinking. It was the 
night after his mother’s funeral. He was only six 
at the time. As soon as they told him that his 
mother was dead, he was filled with curiosity and 
dread. What had happened to her?* He timidly 
crept to her bedside; uncovered the cold, white face; 
touched it; spoke to her; and was puzzled by her icy 
indifference. On the night after the funeral he slept 
with his father in the bed from which his mother’s 
body had just been taken. He was frightened, 
startled, horror-stricken. Where was she? He 
never once closed his eyes; and, to the last day of 
his life, that terrifying experience haunted his 
memory. That night was certainly an exception. 
That night he thought. He thought of life; he 
thought of death; he thought, in his childish way, of 
immortality. 

There was another occasion on which he thought. 
It was during his apprenticeship at Wigton. He 
became enslaved by the gambling habit and often 
sat at the card-table till the grey and ghostly dawn 


14 A Casket of Cameos 


came stealing through the windows. One early 
morning—it was the morning of Christmas Day— 
he returned to his room to find that he had been 
locked out. By dint of climbing over roofs and 
chimneys—an art which he had acquired when 
searching for jackdaws’ eggs—he managed to gain 
entrance to his room through the window. He 
slipped into bed; but not to sleep. For very soon the 
waits came round, singing the Christmas carols. 
“The sweet music awoke me to a sense of my wrong- 
doing. I felt overwhelmed with penitence and re- 
morse. I thought of my dear father and feared that 
1 might break his heart and bring down his grey 
hairs in sorrow to the grave.’ He remained in bed 
all day—ihinking! ‘I resolved,’ he says, ‘to give 
up card-playing and gambling,’ and, true to his 
pledge, he never again touched a card or hazarded 
a coin. 

The third occasion on which he thought was in his 
forty-fifth year. It suddenly occurred to him that 
neither his great success, nor his immense popularity, 
nor his princely benefactions could atone for his sins 
or blot out a certain inner defilement of which he 
was becoming increasingly conscious. ‘I am pain- 
fully aware,’ he says, ‘of the depravity of my own 
heart.’ It worried him; the anxiety of it kept him 
awake at night; he would rise in the darkness, kneel 
in anguish by his bedside, and pray for deliverance. 
‘For the last two years,’ he says, ‘I have been 
earnestly asking God to give me some sudden change 


George Moore’s Text 15 


of heart; but no sudden change comes.’ With 
bitter tears he sought the way of repentance, but, 
like Esau, could not find it. ‘It seems,’ he moaned, 
‘as if God has hidden His face from me.’ And then, 
like a flash, the light broke upon him, and all his 
wretchedness was gone. 


IV 


It was a text that did it. It suddenly occurred 
to him that he had been confusing the salvation of 
his soul with the arrival of certain moods, feelings 
and sensations. Because no rush of ecstasy had 
swept into his heart, he had taken it for granted 
that God had turned a deaf ear to his piteous cries 
and passionate entreaties. He saw his mistake. 

‘IT am determined for the future,’ he says, ‘not 
to perplex my mind with seeking for some extraor- 
dinary impressions, signs, or tokens of the new 
birth. I believe the gospel. I love the Lord Jesus 
Christ. I receive with confidence the promise that 
He that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that 
sent Me, hath everlasting hfe, and shall not come 
into condemnation, but ts passed from death unto 
life. We rested implicitly on that promise and en- 
tered into peace. 

George Moore’s testimony reminds me of Frank 
Bullen’s experience with the same text. It was in 
the old sail-loft at Port Chalmers, in New Zealand. 
Little Mr. Falconer, the sailors’ missionary, had 
conducted an evangelistic service. Frank Bullen, 


16 A Casket of Cameos 


then a sailor-lad, was impressed, and remained be- 
hind for further conversation. Mr. Falconer quoted 
to him the promise on which George Moore had 
rested with such confidence. 

‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth 
My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath 
everlasting life, and shall not come into condemna- 
tion, but is passed from death unto life’ 

Frank Bullen said that he believed; yet his belief 
brought him no assurance of deliverance. 

‘Ah, I see how it is,’ exclaimed Mr. Falconer, 
‘you are waiting for the witness of your feelings to 
the truth of Him who is Himself the Truth. You 
dare not take Him at His word unless your feelings, 
which are subject to a thousand changes a day, 
corroborate it. You must believe Him in spite of 
your feelings and act accordingly.’ 

‘In a moment,’ says Frank Bullen, in telling the 
story years afterwards, ‘in a moment the hidden 
mystery was made clear to me, and I said quietly, 
“T see, sir; it is the credibility of God against the 
witness of my feelings. Then J believe God!” “Let 
us thank God,” answered the little man; and to- 
gether we knelt down by the bench. Little more 
was said. There was no extravagant joy, no glo- 
rious bursting into light and liberty such as I have 
read about as happening on these occasions; it was 
just the satisfaction of having found one’s way 
after long groping in darkness and misery.’ 

That was George Moore’s experience exactly. 


George Moore’s Text 17 


And, when I see this stately ‘Verily, Verily’ opening 
the door of deliverance to this simple sailor-lad on 
one side of the world, and to this great merchant and 
philanthropist on the other, I feel that there are none 
among the sons of men to whom it will deny its 
emancipating ministry. 

‘He that believeth,’ says the text. George Moore 
believed and he kept on believing. ‘The foremost 
feature in his character,’ the biography tells us, ‘was 
the admirable simplicity of his faith. And, in his 
own diary, I come upon entries such as these: 

‘Every day I feel more and more my own un- 
worthiness. I have nothing to rest upon but Christ; 
yet surely that is enough for me!’ 

‘Just as I am, without one plea—a poor, unworthy 
sinner. Christ takes me as I am, without money or 
price or works. My works are nothing.’ 

Such a change had the text wrought! He made 
Mrs. Moore promise—and he often reminded her of 
her pledge—that, if she was with him when he was 
dying, she would repeat the words to him: 

‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth My 
word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath ever- 
lasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, 
but is passed from death unto life. 


V 


The text transfigured everything. It even trans- 
figured his philanthropy. He always revelled in 
giving away his money. Every New Year’s Day, 


18 A Casket of Cameos 


as he started a new pocket book, he inscribed upon 
the flyleaf the lines: 


What I spent, I had: 
What I saved, I lost: 
What I gave, I have. 


He began each year by sending large cheques to 
- the charities and organizations in which he was 
interested, many of which he had himself inaugu- 
rated. He enjoyed giving. ‘If the world only knew 
half the happiness that a man has in doing good,’ he 
used to say, ‘it would do a great deal more.’ And, 
when he first began to feel his need of a Saviour, he 
would add: “I wish that my faith were as strong 
as my works! 

And, when faith came, his works were glorified by 
its coming. It gave to all his activities a new and 
higher motive. He hung in his smokeroom an illu- 
minated tablet on which was inscribed the thirteenth 
chapter of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians— 
the chapter that magnifies the glory of love. In large 
bright letters at the head of the tablet were the 
words: 

CHARITY NEVER FAILETH, 
and, at the foot: 
NOW ABIDETH FAITH. 


Those two inscriptions are very significant. George 
Moore’s later life represents the wedding of Faith 
to Charity. He felt that it was not enough to give 
money and to give it lavishly. ‘I believe,’ he said, in 


George Moore’s Text 10 


addressing a great public meeting at Aldersgate 
Street, ‘I believe that mere money, unless it be given 
for the love of Jesus, is as filthy rags in the sight of 
God.’ He therefore felt it his duty to give it in 
such a way that those for whose benefit it was de- 
signed were made aware of the love that prompted 
it. He was not content to post cheques to treasurers. 
In spite of the protests of his friends, who thought 
it undignified for a rich city merchant to mingle 
with the raggedness and filth of the slums, he went 
fearlessly and familiarly among the thieves, tramps 
and vagrants who herded in London’s squalor. ‘I 
feel,’ he explained, ‘that nothing can reach to the 
depth of human misery, or heal such sorrow, but the 
love of Jesus, the Good Shepherd who yearned over 
such people with infinite pity and gave His life for 
His lost sheep.’ 


VI 


The carriage is at the door. George Moore, now 
a man of seventy, is driving off to preside at a meet- 
ing of the Nurses’ Institution. ‘What,’ he asked his 
wife, as he bade her good-bye, “what is that passage 
that | want to quote? Oh, I remember—“Well done, 
good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of 
thy Lord.”’’ But that speech was never to be deliv- 
ered. He was knocked down by a pair of runaway 
horses. Mrs. Moore hurried to the inn in which he 
was dying, and, bending over him, quoted the text 
in accordance with her promise. 


20 A Casket of Cameos 


‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth My 
word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath ever- 
lasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, 
but is passed from death unto life’ 

‘He looked wistfully into my face,’ says Mrs. 
Moore, ‘and he told me that he was not afraid; his 
Saviour would never leave him nor forsake him. 
Several times afterwards he spoke to me, expressing 
the same trust. He knew perfectly well that he was 
dying; but his faith failed not.’ 

‘From death unto life? 

‘Well done, good and fathful servant, enter thou 
into the joy of thy Lord! 

He intended to have quoted the words to others; 
the programme was altered; and he went to hear 
them addressed to himself! 


il 
DAVID BRAINERD’S TEXT 


{ 


It is a thickly-wooded solitude beside a graceful in- 
let of the Susquehanna. The dense and matted 
vegetation stands as it has stood from the founda- 
tion of the world. The silence of the wilderness is 
broken only by the lapping of the mimic wavelets 
and the flapping of the wings of the waterfowl. On 
the mossy bank near the water’s edge sits a white 
man, a mere youth—the palest of palefaces—with 
his Bible on his knee. Have a good look at him; 
he is a man ina million; he did more than any other 
to usher in the world’s new day. He is the morning 
star of the missionary movement. He isa tall spare 
youth, of almost feminine face, and large, sad, lus- 
trous eyes. It is a lovely evening in the early sum- 
mer of 1744; and, only a few yards from him, a 
colony of beavers is building a dam across the 
stream. Looking up from the open page before 
him, he watches the clever little creatures at their 
task. They have no more idea that they are observed 
than he knows that he is being watched by wolfish 
eyes concealed within the impenetrable foliage. The 
red men, as silent and as sinewy as serpents, follow 
21 


22 A Casket of Cameos 


him everywhere and mark his every step. It is well 
for him that they do. 

For, on his very first journey to the Forks of the 
Delaware, the insatiable curiosity of the Indians 
saved his life. He had been told of a particularly 
ferocious tribe, living far back in the forests of 
New Jersey, and he determined to take the gospel 
to them. When, towards evening, he saw the smoke 
of their camp fires, he pitched his tent and resolved 
to enter the settlement in the morning. He had been 
led to expect a hostile reception, but, to his inde- 
scribable astonishment, the whole tribe came out to 
meet him as, soon after sunrise, he approached the 
wigwams. ‘The reverence that they exhibited almost 
took his breath away. He only learned later that, 
during the night that he had spent on the outskirts 
of the village, their sharp eyes had been constantly 
upon him. As soon as it was whispered that a white — 
man was coming through the woods, a party of 
warriors had gone forth to kill him. But, when they 
drew near to his tent, they saw the paleface on his 
knees. And, even whilst he prayed, a rattlesnake 
crept to his side, lifted its ugly head as if to strike, 
flicked its forked tongue almost in his face, and 
then, without any apparent reason, glided swiftly 
away into the brushwood. ‘The Great Spirit is with 
the paleface!’ the Indians said; and they accorded 
him a prophet’s welcome. 

But we have digressed. We left David Brainerd 
sitting under a broad-leafed basswood tree, watching 


David Brainerd’s Text 23 


the beavers in the river below. Something has 
frightened the beavers now, and they have vanished ; 
perhaps they caught a glimpse of the white man or 
of the Indians among the trees. At any rate, they 
have gone; and, now that he has nothing to distract 
him, his eyes are fastened once more upon the Bible 
on his knee. It lies open at the page that is more 
thumbed than any other. To it he always turns in 
moments of great loneliness or great anxiety or 
great depression. He is reading from the seventh 
of John. In the last day, that great day of the feast, 
Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let 
him come unto Me and drink. Whilst David Brain- 
erd, a youth of twenty-six, sat beside that lonely 
western stream, John Wesley, in the prime of life, 
was stirring England as England had never been 
stirred before. In some respects they were twin 
souls, although the one died at twenty-nine, whilst 
the other lived to be nearly ninety. One of Brain- 
erd’s biographers has said of him that ‘he belonged 
to a class of men who seem to be chosen of heaven 
to illustrate the sublime possibilities of Christian 
attainment; men of seraphic fervor of devotion; 
men whose one overmastering passion is to win souls 
for Christ and to become wholly like Him them- 
selves.’ To this heroic class John Wesley also be- 
longed. He recognized his spiritual kinship. ‘What 
can be done,’ he asked his English Conference, ‘what 
can be done to revive the work of God where it has 
decayed?’ And he answered his own question by 


24 A Casket of Cameos 


replying: ‘Let every preacher read carefully the 
Life of David Brainerd’ To-day, Wesley s Journal 
and Brainerd’s Journal stand side by side among our 
choicest classics of devotion. In his early days John 
Wesley devoted himself to the evangelization of 
the Red Indians: David Brainerd spent all his 
ministerial days among them. Mr. Wesley used to 
say that, whenever the cravings of his soul became 
so intense that no satisfaction could be found, even 
at earth’s purest fountains, he invariably found com- 
fort in that sublime proclamation: Jf any man 
thirst, let him come unto Me and drink! 

‘Come! cried the Saviour in the temple courts. 

‘Come unto Me! 

‘Tf any man thirst, let him come unto Me and 
drink !’ 

John Wesley and David Brainerd never saw each 
other’s faces; it may be that, until after Brainerd’s 
death, Mr. Wesley never so much as heard his young 
contemporary’s name; the Atlantic rolled between 
them, and their fields lay far apart; but, in their 
affection for the Saviour’s stupendous proclamation 
at the Feast of Tabernacles, their twin hearts beat 
as one. 


If 


David Brainerd only lived to be twenty-nine; yet, 
during that brief career of his, he assumed three 
separate and distinct relationships towards the text. 

There was a time when the text irritated him. It 


David Brainerd’s Text 25 


is his own word. He was reared in a Puritan home 
in Connecticut, and was left an orphan at fourteen. 
As a little boy he was extraordinarily serious, and 
startled his elders by asking the most grave and 
searching questions. ‘I was from my youth some- 
what sober and inclined to melancholy,’ his Journal 
tells us, ‘but do not remember anything of convic- 
tion of sin, worthy of remark, till I was seven or 
eight years of age.’ Then began a period of dark- 
ness and distress which, though varying in intensity, 
lasted until he was a youth of twenty-one. At about 
that age he was walking one morning in a solitary 
place when, as he says, he was brought to a sudden 
stand. He felt like a man reeling on the edge of 
a precipice. ‘It seemed to me,’ he says, ‘that I was 
totally lost.’ Mr. Stoddart’s Guide to Christ fell 
into his hands; but, as he says, it only irritated him. 
He felt angry with the author. For, although the 
book described with scientific accuracy the terrible 
distress which he was himself experiencing, it did 
not satisfactorily explain to him the way of deliv- 
erance. It told him to come to Christ. ‘Tf any man 
thirst, let him come unto Me and drink? But what, 
precisely, did Mr. Stoddart mean? What, precisely, 
did the Saviour mean? ‘Whilst I was in this dis- 
tressed, bewildered and tumultuous state of mind, I 
was irritated, he writes, ‘through not being able to 
find out what faith was. What was it to believe? 
What was it to come to Christ? I read the calls 
of Christ to the weary and the heavy-laden, but 


26 A Casket of Cameos 


could find no way that He directed me to come in. 
I thought that I would gladly come, if 1 only knew 
how. Mr. Stoddart’s book told me to come to 
Christ, but did not tell me anything that I could do 
that would bring me to Him. For,’ he significantly 
adds, ‘I was not yet effectually and experimentally 
taught that there could be no way prescribed, where- 
by a natural man could, of his own strength, obtain 
that which is supernatural, and which the highest 
angel cannot give.’ 

And so the text, coming to him the first time, 
brought no comfort. It only awoke ‘a great inward 
opposition.’ It irritated him. 


Iil 


Happily, the text repeated its visit. God gives 
second knocks. Again the Saviour stood and cried, 
as He cried on the great day of the feast, Jf any man 
thirst, let him come unto Me and drink. And this 
time the text captivated him. Again, it is his own 
word. It was a Sunday evening—the evening of 
July 12,1739. He was walking in the same solitary 
place. ‘At this time,’ he says, ‘the way of salvation 
opened to me with such infinite wisdom, suitableness 
and excellency that I wondered that I should ever 
have desired any other way of salvation. I was 
amazed that I had not dropped my own contrivances 
and complied with this lovely, blessed and excellent 
way before. If I could have been saved by my 
own duties, or any other way that I had formerly 


David Brainerd’s Text 24 


conceived, my whole soul would now have refused 
it. I wondered that all the world did not see and 
comply with this way of salvation.’ 

‘Tf any man thirst—it is the only condition. 

‘Let him come unto Me’—it is the only command. 

‘Let him come unto Me and drink !’—it is the only 
satisfaction that a thirsty man desires. 

And David Brainerd was a thirsty man. You 
can scarcely find a paragraph in his Journal in which 
the symbolism of the parched tongue does not occur. 
‘I felt my soul hungering and thirsting.’ ‘I hungered 
and thirsted, but was not refreshed and satisfied.’ 
‘My soul longed for God, the living God.’ ‘T thirsted 
night and day for a closer acquaintance with Him.’ 
Such phrases punctuate every page. 

‘T longed!’ ‘I longed! ‘I longed? 

‘I thirsted! ‘I thirsted? ‘I thirsted’ 

‘Tf any man thirst, let him come unto Me and 
drink 

Brainerd thirsted: Brainerd came; Brainerd 
drank! He left that solitary retreat of his that day 
singing in his soul the song that, a century later, 
Horatius Bonar reduced to language: 

I heard the voice of Jesus say, 
‘Behold, I freely give 
The living water; thirsty one, 
Stoop down, and drink and live.’ 
I came to Jesus, and I drank 
Of that life-giving stream; 
My thirst was quenched, my soul revived, 
And now I live in Him. 


28 A Casket of Cameos 


‘Unspeakable glory seemed,’ he says, “to open to 
the view and apprehension of my soul. [| do not 
mean any external brightness, for I saw no such 
thing. It was a new view of God such as I had 
never had before. I stood still, wondered and ad- 
mired. I had never before seen anything compa- 
rable to it for excellency and beauty; it was widely 
different from all the conceptions that ever I had had 
of God or things divine. I felt myself in a new 
world, and everything about me appeared with a dif- 
ferent aspect from what it was wont todo. My soul! 
was captivated and delighted. I rejoiced with joy 
unspeakable.’ 

‘That,’ says President Jonathan Edwards, in 
pointing to this entry in the Journal, ‘that is the 
story of Brainerd’s conversion. It was not a mere 
confirmation of certain moral principles: it was 
entirely a supernatural work, turning him at once 
from darkness to marvellous light, and from the 
power of sin to the dominion of holiness.’ “The 
change he then experienced was,’ the President says 
again, ‘the greatest change that ever he knew.’ It 
transhgured his whole life. 

And so the text that, on its first appearance, irri- 
tated him, came again, and, at its second coming, 
captivated him. ‘I was completely captivated! he 
joyously exclaims. 


IV 
But there was a third phase. The words that first 


David Brainerd’s Text 29 


irritated and then captivated him, at length animated 
his whole being. 

As soon as the burning thirst of his own soul had 
been divinely slaked, it occurred to him that such 
thirst was no monopoly of his. The text as good as 
said so, 

‘Tf any man thirst’ 

‘Any man!’ “Any man! ‘Any man? 

‘Tf any man thirst, let him come unto Me and 
drink! 

Brainerd seemed to be looking out upon a thirsty 
world. His lot was cast in an age that knew nothing 
of missionary enterprise. Our great societies were 
yet unborn. For the evangelization of the world no 
prayers were offered and no money given. It was 
through reading Brainerd’s Life, in accordance with 
Mr. Wesley’s counsel, that William Carey caught 
his vision and threw open the doors of a new day. It 
was Brainerd’s biography that made Henry Martyn 
a missionary. Brainerd was a leader, a pathfinder, 
a pioneer; he blazed the trail. “His story,’ as Mr. 
J. M. Sherwood says, ‘proves him to be one of the 
most illustrious characters of modern times; it has 
done more to develop and mould the spirit of modern 
missions, and to fire the heart of the Christian 
church, than that of any other man since the apos- 
tolic age. One such personage, one such character, » 
is a greater power in human history than a finite 
mind can calculate.’ 

He longed to tell the whole wide world of the 


30 A Casket of Cameos 


Saviour’s cry: ‘Jf any man thirst, let him come 
unto Me and drink? But how could he? China, 
India, Africa—all these were out of the question. 
He thought of the heathen that haunted the prairies 
and forests of his own land. He was scarcely more 
than a boy, and he felt the fascination that youth 
has always felt for the distinctive and picturesque 
features of Indian life. He thought of the canoes 
and the wigwams; the mats and the moccasins, the 
frayed leggings and the feathered head-gear, the 
bows and the quivers, the scalping-knives and the 
tomahawks, the pow-wows and the peace-pipes; he 
thought of these, and he thought, above all, of the 
man himself. He thought of the Indian’s haughty 
and taciturn demeanor, of his lithe and agile move- 
ment, of his simple but dignified eloquence, of his 
courage and resourcefulness of the warpath, and of 
his poetic and imaginative accomplishments in time 
of peace. David Brainerd made up his mind that 
the Indian was well worth winning, and he devoted 
his young life to the conquest. 

He was not mistaken in supposing that others 
were thirsty as well as he. Again and again in 
his Journal he speaks of the hunger of the tribes for 
the message that he took them. He tells how an 
Iroquois woman confessed that, from the moment at 
which she first heard him, her whole heart had 
cried out for the gospel. To a great assembly of 
tattooed warriors he preaches on ‘Herein is love, not 
that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent 


David Brainerd’s Text 31 


His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” “There 
were scarce three in forty,’ he says, ‘that could re- 
frain from tears, and the more I discoursed of the 
love and compassion of God in sending His Son to 
suffer for the sins of men, the more they wept.’ And 
he tells of another occasion on which, when he un- 
covered the communion-table and explained the sig- 
nificance of the sacred mysteries, the whole com- 
pany was dissolved in tears. 

And so this frail young consumptive, racked with 
his cough and never free from pain, passed from 
tribe to tribe, telling everywhere the story of the 
Cross. Groping his way through dense and track- 
less forests, he spent most of his days in the saddle, 
startling the creatures of the wild as he broke upon 
their age-long solitudes. Most of his nights he spent 
beneath the open sky. Frail as was his frame, he 
exposed himself to perils and privations of every 
kind. Yet, as Mr. Sherwood says, he never wa- 
vered in his purpose, never regretted his choice, and 
never paused in his task until, after five brief but 
strenuous years, he rode back to New England to die. 

And the text, still holding its old place in his heart, 
was ever on his tongue. It ever impelled him to fresh 
conquests. Here are a few extracts from the Journal: 

Feb. 15,1745. This evening I was much assisted 
in meditating on that precious text: Jesus stood 
and cried, If any man thirst, let him come unto Me 
and drink! I longed to proclaim such grace to the 
whole world of sinners. 


32 A Casket of Cameos 


Feb. 17, 1745. On the sunny side of a hill in the 
wilderness, I preached all day, to people who had 
come twenty miles to hear me, on Jesus stood and 
cried, If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and 
drink! I was scarce ever enabled to offer the free 
grace of God to perishing sinners with more plainness. 

April 22, 1745. Preached, with freedom and life, 
from Jesus stood and cried, If any man tlurst, let 
him come unto Me and drink! | 

August 5, 1745. Preached to the Indians from 
Jesus stood and cried, If any man thirst, let him 
come unto Me and drink! Some, who had never 
been affected before, were struck with deep concern; 
others had their concern greatly deepened. 

He died on October 9, 1747. He was not yet 
thirty, but he had no regrets. ‘Now that I am dy- 
ing,’ he exclaimed, ‘I declare that I would not for 
all the world have spent my life otherwise! Near 
the end, Miss Edwards, to whom he was betrothed, 
and who followed him into the unseen about four 
months later, entered the sickroom with a Bible in 
her hand. ‘Oh, that dear book!’ he cried, ‘that 
lovely book! I shall soon see it opened! The mys- 
teries in it, and the mysteries of God’s providence, 
will all be unfolded!’ Thus he clung to the promise 
of the text to the last. He was radiantly confident 
that the thirst of the soul—the thirst for knowledge 
and illumination—the thirst that had been only par- 
tially quenched in this world—would be abundantly 
satisfied in the realms of everlasting light. 


Vat 
SIR ERNEST SHACKLETON’S TEXT 


I 


FLAME or frost; it makes no difference. <A truth 
that, in one age, can hold its own in a burning fiery 
furnace can, in another, vindicate itself just as 
readily amidst fields of ice and snow. 

‘One, two, three—four!’ counted the king, as he 
gazed in astonishment upon the Babylonian furnace. 

‘One, two, three—four!’ exclaimed the explorer, 
in reverent delight, as he forced his hazardous way 

over the snowdrifts and glaciers of the terrible 
- Antarctic. 

‘And Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonished, 
and rose up in haste, and spake, and said unto his 
counsellors, Did not we cast three men bound into 
the midst of the fire? They answered and said, 
True, O King! He answered and said, Lo, I see four 
men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they 
have no hurt, and the form of the fourth 1s like the 
Son of God’ 

“We all felt that there were, not three, but four of 
us,’ said Sir Ernest Shackleton. He was speaking 
at a banquet given in London in his honor, and was 
describing the thrilling adventures of the Rescue 
Expedition, as, after the sinking of the Endurance, 


33 


34 A Casket of Cameos 


they made their way in an open boat—a twenty-foot 
whaler—over eight hundred miles of stormswept 
sea, and then crawled and clambered over the dizzy 
peaks and slippery glaciers of South Georgia—the 
gate of the Antarctic—in order that they might ob- 
tain succor for their twenty comrades marooned on 
Elephant Island. As Sir Ernest told his story, 
the listeners held their breath. That lonely voyage 
on a polar sea, and that intrepid climb over un- 
charted ranges, was the wildest adventure of the 
speaker's life. Mr. Edward Marston, the well- 
known artist, accompanied Shackleton to the South, 
and was one of the men who owed their lives to that 
astounding journey. Mr. Marston declares that his 
leader’s voyage in the open boat is one of the most 
magnificent feats of courage ever performed, whilst 
his climb across the frozen heights of South Georgia, 
never before accomplished by man, was one of 
splendid, almost incredible endurance. ‘His re- 
peated attempts to reach and rescue us,’ Mr. Mars- 
ton adds, ‘and his ultimate success in the face of 
apparently insuperable difficulties, proved the in- 
domitable perseverance of his mind.’ At that Lon- 
don banquet Shackleton said nothing of these his- 
toric heroisms of his; but he said something no less 
notable. ‘You could have heard a pin drop,’ says 
one who was present, ‘when Sir Ernest spoke of his 
consciousness of a Divine Companion in his jour- 
neyings.’ Happily, the explorer afterwards wrote 
a book, and, in the stirring pages of South, he has 


Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Text a5 


left the story on imperishable record. ‘When,’ he 
says, ‘I look back upon those days, with all their 
anxiety and peril, [ cannot doubt that our party was 
divinely guided, both over the snowfields and across 
the stormswept sea. I know that, during that long 
and racking march of thirty-six hours over the un- 
named mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, 
it seemed to me, very often, that we were, not three, 
but four! I said nothing to my companions on the 
point, but afterwards Worsley said to me: “Boss, 
I had a curious feeling on the march that there was 
Another Person with us.” Crean confessed to the 
same idea. One feels the dearth of human words, 
the roughness of mortal speech in trying to tell of 
things intangible, but a record of our journeys 
would be incomplete without a reference to a sub- 
ject very near our hearts.’ 

Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego and—Ancother! 

Shackleton, Worsley, Crean and—Another! 

One, two, three—four, in the fiery furnace! 

One, two, three—four, in the stormy seas and in 
the frozen snow! 

And lo, the form of the fourth was like the Son of 
God! 


sft 


Having given us, both with his lips and with his 
pen, this noble testimony, Sir Ernest set himself to 
prepare for his last—and fatal—voyage. It was not 
his custom to take with him anything with which he 


36 A Casket of Cameos 


could dispense; but he insisted on including among 
his treasures a gramophone record of Dame Clara 
Butt’s rendering of Abide with Me. He wanted to 
be assured in that melodious way that the Invisible 
Companion of his former expedition would con- 
stantly attend him on this one. “Just think,’ said a 
London writer at the time, ‘just think of those words 
and of that music—“I need Thy presence every 
passing hour’—ringing out across the icebound 
wastes of the Antarctic!’ Jt was Shackleton’s one 
thought, and it grew upon him towards the close. 
“As we made that journey over the icy ranges,’ he 
says, “we saw God in His splendors and heard the 
text that Nature renders. And what was the text? 
We are left in no uncertainty. Just before leaving 
England for the last time, he delivered an address, 
in the course of which he repeated his testimony con- 
cerning his Unseen Comrade. Miss Ada E. War- 
den, who was present, says that ‘after repeating 
the story of the appalling voyage in the open boat 
from Elephant Island to South Georgia, he quoted 
the words from the one hundred and thirty-ninth 
Psalm: “Tf I take the wings of the morning, and 
dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there 
shall Thy hand lead me and Thy right hand shall 
hold me.” He repeated the words most impressive- 
ly, and said that they were a continual source of 
strength to him. I, for one, shall never read those 
beautiful words without recalling his testimony.’ 
“We were comrades with Death all the time,’ he 


Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Text 37 


said to Mr. Harold Begbie in the course of a casual 
conversation, ‘but I can honestly say that it wasn’t 
bad. We always felt that there was Something 
Above. You know the words—If I take the wings 
of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of 
the sea, even there shall Thy hand lead me and Thy 
right hand shall hold me. That Psalm exactly fitted 
our case.’ 

‘One, two three—four!’ 

‘In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me! 

‘Tf I take the wings of the morning, and dwell im 
the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shail Thy 
hand lead me and Thy right hand shall hold me’ 

There can, then, be no shadow of doubt about 
Sir Ernest Shackleton’s text. His body has been 
laid to rest among the eternal snows, close to the 
scene of his most daring exploit. ‘To another sea,’ 
as Mr. Begbie says, ‘he has now sailed his ship, a 
sea of silence, darkness and mystery, but with a 
coastline glowing in the rays of a brighter sun. 
Across that sea many greater spirits have sailed, but 
few, I think, with steadier hearts and eyes more 
eager for new shores.’ He has bequeathed to us 
an example and a testimony that will live for ever- 
more. 


Til 


Yes, that text is Shackleton’s text; but it is not 
Shackleton’s alone. It is every traveller’s text. It 
comforted Enoch Arden on the day on which he 


38 A Casket of Cameos 


sailed; and, with it, he, in his blunt sailor-fashion, 
tried to comfort poor Annie: 


‘Annie, my girl, cheer up, be comforted, 

Look to the babes, and, till 1 come again, 
Keep everything ship-shape, for I must go. 
And fear no more for me; or, if you fear, 
Cast all your cares on God; that anchor holds! 
Is He not yonder in those uttermost 

Parts of the morning? if I flee to these 

Can I go from Him? and the sea is His, 

The sea is His: He made it.’ 


Before I settled at my present church I had the 
honor of holding two pastorates: one in New Zea- 
land and one in Tasmania. In New Zealand no 
name is more honored than that of Bishop Selwyn; 
in Tasmania none is more cherished than that of 
Sir John Franklin. Now here is a striking and im- 
pressive coincidence! When young Selwyn landed 
in New Zealand, that country was the land of the 
Maori; and the Maori had the reputation of being 
the most ferocious of cannibals. The youthful 
Bishop looked around upon a land of voleanic won- 
ders and of the most unusual vegetation, When 
Sunday came, he conducted his very first service in 
the new land. Turning for a moment from the 
natives to his white companions, he exclaimed: ‘A 
great change has taken place in the circumstances 
of our natural life; but no change which need affect 
our spiritual being. We have come to a land where 
not so much as a tree resembles those of our native 


Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Text 39 


country. All visible things are new and strange: 
but the things that are unseen remain the same.’ 
And he took, as the text of that first sermon in 
New Zealand, the text from which, nearly a century 
later, Sir Ernest Shackleton drew such wealthy 
stores of inspiration: Jf I take the wings of the 
morning, and dwell im the uttermost parts of the 
sea, even there shall Thy hand lead me and Thy 
right hand shall hold me. 

So much for Bishop Selwyn: now for Sir John 
Franklin, whose statue I passed every day at Hobart. 
Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, away in Arctic 
seas, found a boat-load of bones, representing all 
that remained of the Franklin expedition... And with 
the bones were some Bibles. For some time these 
Bibles were to be seen at the United Service Muse- 
um, and visitors were deeply impressed at the sight 
of one in which these words had been marked and 
underlined: If I take the wings of the mormng, 
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even 
there shall Thy hand lead me and Thy right hand 
shall hold me. 

‘Even there!’ ‘Even there! 

Out in the unknown—with Enoch Arden! 

At the Antipodes—with Selwyn! 

In the frozen North—with Franklin! 

At the Antarctic—with Shackleton! 

‘Even there! ‘Even there? 

Even there shall Thy hand lead me and Thy right 
hand shall hold me. 


40 A Casket of Cameos 


IV 


In the development of Church history there have 
been scores of heresy hunts; but there have only 
been two heresies. Adam started the first, and Cain 
inaugurated the second. The first was the heresy 
of Thereness: the second was the heresy of Here- 
ness. Adam believed that God was there, but not 
here: so he hid. Cain believed that God was here, 
but not there; so he went out from the presence of 
the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod. The 
heretics of the Old Testament were all of them en- 
slaved by one or other of these twin fallacies. 
Jacob, for example, thought of God as a poor little 
tribal deity who could lend Himself to trickery and 
cunning, and who dwelt in the narrow slice of land 
in which his father happened to reside. It came 
upon him as a bewildering surprise that, in his 
fugitive flight, he had not evaded the vigilant care 
of the Most High. From his stony pillow in the 
wilderness there was a ladder that led to heaven, 
and, wherever he fled, God’s angels were! Naa- 
man’s pitiful conception of God led him to carry 
home with him two mules’ burden of the soil of 
Canaan that he might enjoy the superstitious satis- 
faction of praying to Jehovah on the very soil that 
His Spirit pervaded. Jonah cherished the thought 
of a God who could readily be evaded by the simple 
expedient of crossing the sea. From the deck of 
a gallant vessel of Tarshish he waved a confident 


Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Text AI 


good-bye to the God whom he was leaving behind. 
The heresies of Hereness and Thereness have 
blighted ten thousand lives, and they may easily 
blight ours. 

They almost wrecked the faith of Uncle Tom. 
Uncle Tom had been sold away from the old Ken- 
tucky home; and, herded with a throng of other 
slaves, was being carried on a steamboat up the Red 
River. All that he loved was left behind. That 
night he sat on the deck in the moonlight; and, for 
the first time, his faith staggered. It really seemed 
to him that, in leaving Aunt Chloe and the children 
and his old companions, he was leaving God! He 
could believe that God dwelt in old Kentucky; but 
how could God dwell among the horrors of the Red 
River? ‘Is God here?’ he asked himself, again and 
again; and, at last, disconsolate, he threw himself 
upon the floor and fell asleep. And, in his sleep, he 
dreamed. He dreamed that he was back again, and 
that little Eva was reading to him from the Bible 
as of old. He could hear her voice: When thou 
passest through the waters, I will be with thee; for 
fam the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy 
Saviour. A little later, poor Tom was writhing 
under the cruel lash of his new owner. ‘But,’ says 
Mrs. Stowe, ‘the blows fell only upon the outer man, 
and not, as before, on the heart. Tom stood sub- 
missive; and yet Legree could not hide from him- 
self the fact that his power over his victim had 
gone. As Tom disappeared in his cabin, and Legree 


42 A Casket of Cameos 


wheeled his horse suddenly round, there passed 
through the tyrant’s mind one of those vivid flashes 
that often send the lightning of conscience across the 
dark and wicked soul. He understood full well 
that it was God who was standing between him and 
Tom, and he blasphemed Him! 

‘Is God here?’ Tom asked, that dreadful night. 

‘When thou passest through the waters, I will be 
with thee, said the gentle little voice in the dream. 

‘Legree knew that it was God who stood between 
Ius victim and himself. 

For—even there, even there, shall Thy hand lead 
me and Thy right hand shall hold me, 

Even there! Even there! 

In his Scapegoat, Sir Hall Caine has very ten- 
derly portrayed the hunger of the heart for the 
father’s presence. Little Naomi is deaf and dumb 
and blind. Her mother is dead. She lives with her 
father, and he is an alien in a strange land. And 
often, in the night, Israel would wake and find the 
silent little figure, robed in white, standing beside 
his bed. Darkness and light were alike to her. She 
could not tell him why she came. She just wanted 
to feel that he was near. ‘So, with a sigh, he would 
arise and light his lamp and lead her back to bed, 
and, more scalding than the tears that would be 
standing in Naomi’s eyes, would be the hot drops 
that would gush into his own.’ 

The Unseen Comrade! The Invisible Compan- 
ion! The Hunger of the Heart for the Father’s 


Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Text 43 


Presence! Livingstone felt it in the burning heat 
of Africa; Shackleton felt it amidst the blinding 
whiteness of the frozen South. ‘Abide with me! 
he prayed. It was the child feeling, like little 
Naomi, for the father’s hand. Did the words sing 
themselves to his soul at the last? 


Be Thou Thyself before my closing eyes; 

Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies: 
Heaven’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee; 
In life—in death—O Lord, abide with me! 


I do not know whether, as he set out on his last 
long journey, these favorite words of his came back 
to him. I only know—and he knew—that the In- 
visible Comrade was there. He never fails nor for- 
sakes. ‘If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell 
in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall 
Thy hand lead me and Thy right hand shall hold 
me.’ He has taken the wings of a new morning, but 
the old promise holds good. The Father will clasp 
the hand of His child on any sea and on any shore. 


IV 
GEORGE WHITEFIELD’S TEXT 


I 
/ 
GEORGE WHITEFIELD was the first man who treated 
Great Britain and America as if they both belonged 
to him. He passed from the one to the other as 
though they were a pair of rural villages, and he was 
the minister in charge of the parish. George White- 
field took a couple of continents under his wing; and 
the wing proved capacious enough for the task. 

In days when the trip was a serious undertaking, 
he crossed the Atlantic thirteen times; but, of all his 
voyages, this was the worst. Day after day, plough- 
ing her way through terrific seas, the good ship had 
shuddered in the grip of the gale. The sailors were 
at their wits’ end: the sails were torn to ribbons and 
the tackling was all strained and broken. George 
Whitefield, who, wrapped in a buffalo hide, sleeps 
in the most protected part of the vessel, has been 
drenched through and through twice in one night. 
The ship has been so buffeted and beaten that nearly 
three months have passed before the Irish coast is 
sighted. Rations have been reduced to famine fare. 
The gravest anxiety marks every countenance. 

To-day, however, there is a lull in the storm. The 
seas have moderated and the sun is shining. In the 


44 


George Whitefield’s Text 45 


afternoon, Mr. Whitefield assembles the passengers 
and crew, and conducts a service on the deck. Have 
a good look at him! He is twenty-five, tall, graceful 
and well proportioned; of fair complexion and 
bright blue eyes. There is a singular cast in one of 
those eyes, which, though not unsightly, has the 
curious effect of making each hearer feel that the 
preacher is looking directly at him. There is some- 
thing extraordinarily commanding about him; it was 
said that, by raising his hand, he could reduce an 
unruly rabble of twenty thousand people to instant 
silence. His voice, strong and rich and musical, was 
so perfectly modulated and controlled that his 
audiences were charmed into rapt attention. It had 
phenomenal carrying power. Whilst Whitefield was 
preaching in the open air one day, Benjamin Frank- 
lin, who was present, made a singular computation. 
He walked backwards until he reached a point at 
which he could no longer hear every word distinctly. 
He marked the spot and afterwards measured the 
distance. Asa result, he calculated that Mr. White- 
field could command an audience of thirty thousand 
people without straining his voice in the least. 
To-day, however, instead of thirty thousand 
people, he has barely thirty. Standing on the hatch- 
way, with a coil of rope at his feet, he announces 
his text: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a 
man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of 
God.’ The passengers lounging about the deck, and 
the sailors leaning against the bulwarks, listen 


46 A Casket of Cameos 


breathlessly as, for half an hour, an earnest and 
eloquent man pours out his heart in personal testi- 
mony, powerful exposition and passionate entreaty. 
‘Every man,’ he cries, ‘who has even the least con- 
cern for the salvation of his precious and immortal 
soul should never cease watching and praying and 
striving till he find a real, inward, saving change 
wrought in his heart, and thereby doth know of a 
truth that he has been born again.’ 

‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be 
born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ 
That is George Whitefield’s text in mid-Atlantic be- 
cause it is George Whitefield’s text on both sides of 
the Atlantic. In season and out of season, in public 
and in private, he ceaselessly proclaimed that mes- 
sage. He felt that he was sent into the world to 
call the attention of men to that one mandatory word. 
He is known to have preached more than three 
hundred times from this memorable and striking 
passage. And nobody who has read the story of 
his spiritual travail will marvel for a moment at his 
having done so. 


II 


For it was that great text about the new birth that 
had thrown open to him the gates of the kingdom of 
God. He was only a schoolboy when it first dawned 
upon him that, between him and that kingdom, a 
frightful chasm yawned. ‘I got acquainted,’ he says, 
‘with such a set of debauched, abandoned, atheistical 


George Whitefield’s Text 47 


youths that if God, by His free grace, had not deliv- 
ered me out of their hands, I should long ago have 
sat in the scorner’s chair. I took pleasure in their 
lewd conversation. My thoughts of religion became 
more and more like theirs. 1 affected to look rakish 
and was in a fair way of being as infamous as the 
worst of them.’ Then came the sudden arrest, the 
quick realization of his folly; and the vision of the 
hideous blackness of his own heart. But how to 
cure it? that was the problem. He resolved to 
change, at any rate, his outward bearing. “As, once, 
I affected to look more rakish, so now I strove to 
appear more grave than I really was.’ This, how- 
ever, was cold comfort; it was like painting rotten 
wood : he was conscious all the time of the concealed 
corruption. He tried another course. He denied 
himself every luxury; wore ragged and even dirty 
clothes; ate no foods but those that were repugnant 
to him; fasted altogether twice a week; gave his 
money to the poor; and spent whole nights in prayer 
lying prostrate on the cold stones or the wet grass. 
But it was all of no avail. He felt that there was 
something radically wrong in the very heart of him, 
something that all this penance and self-degradation 
could not change. Then came the Angel of Deliv- 
erance; and the Angel of Deliverance bore three 
golden keys. One was a man: one was a book: one 
was a text. 

The man was Charles Wesley, the minstrel of 
Methodism, George Whitefield and Charles Wesley 


48 A Casket of Cameos 


were, by this time, fellow-students at Oxford. Wes- 
ley noticed the tall, grave youth, always walking 
alone, apparently in deep thought; and he felt 
strangely drawn to him. They met. Forty years 
afterwards Charles Wesley commemorated that 
meeting: 


Can I the memorable day forget, 

When first we by divine appointment met? 
Where undisturbed the thoughtful student roves, 
In search of truth, through academic groves; 
A modest pensive youth, who mused alone, 
Industrious the beaten path to shun, 

An Israelite, without disguise or art, 

I saw, I loved, and clasped him to my heart, 

A stranger as my bosom friend caressed, 

And unawares received an angel-guest! 


But, if Whitefield was ‘an angel-guest’ to Charles 
Wesley, Charles Wesley was certainly no less to 
Whitefield. Whitefield often referred to him as ‘my 
never-to-be-forgotten friend.’ In those days Charles 
Wesley also was groping after the light: he could 
not, therefore, solve his new friend’s aching prob- 
lem: but he could lend him the books that he him- 
self was reading; and he did. 

The book that Charles Wesley lent George White- 
field was Henry Scougal’s The Life of God in the 
Soul of Man. He read it with amazement and de- 
light. It told him exactly what he longed to know. 
He learned for the first time that true religion is 
a union of the soul with God; it is Christ formed 


George Whitefield’s Text 49 


within us. ‘When I read this,’ he says, ‘a ray of 
divine light instantaneously darted in upon my soul; 
and, from that moment, but not till then, did I know 
that I must become a new creature” He is a young 
man of twenty-one. “After having undergone in- 
numerable buffetings by day and night, God was 
pleased at length,’ he says, ‘to remove my heavy load 
and to enable me, by a living faith, to lay hold on 
His dear Son. And oh! with what joy—joy un- 
speakable and full of glory—was I filled when the 
weight of sin left me and an abiding sense of the 
pardoning love of God broke in upon my discon- 
solate soul!’ His first act in his ecstasy was to 
write to all his relatives. ‘I have found,’ he tells 
them, ‘that there is such a thing as the new birth,’ 

‘T must be a new creature!’ 

‘There is such a thing as the new birth? 

‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be 
born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God? 

It was thus that the man introduced the book; 
and the book introduced the fext; and the tert led 
George Whitefield into the kingdom of God. ‘I 
know the exact place,’ he says. ‘It may perhaps be 
superstitious, but, whenever I go to Oxford, I can- 
not help running to the spot where Jesus Christ first 
revealed Himself to me and gave me a@ new birth.’ 


III 


A new creature! 
The new birth! 


50 A Casket of Cameos 


4 


‘Except a man be born agan.... 

What does it mean? It means, if it means any- 
thing, that the miracle of Creation’s morning may 
be re-enacted: a man may be made all over again. 
He may be changed root and branch: the very fibre 
' and fabric of his manhood may be transfigured. 
You ask me to explain this new creation: I will do 
so when you have explained the earlier one. You 
ask me to explain this second birth: I merely re- 
mind you that the first birth—the physical and in- 
tellectual one—is involved in inscrutable mystery. 

I cannot explain the creation of the universe; but, 
for all that, here is the universe! 

I cannot explain the mystery of birth; but what 
does it matter? here is the child! 

I cannot explain the truth that, darting like a flash 
of lightning into the soul of that Oxford student, 
transforms his whole life; but, explained or unex- 
plained, here is George Whitefield! 

‘O Lord,’ muttered Alexander Pope one day, 
‘make me a better man!’ 

‘It would be easier,’ replied his spiritually-en- 
lightened page, ‘to make you a new man!’ 

And in that distinction lies the whole doctrine that 
so startled and captivated and dominated the life of 
George Whitefield. 


IV 


With this text burned into his very soul, and in- 
scribed indelibly upon his mind, George Whitefield 


George Whitefield’s Text oT 


mapped out the programme of his life. He set him- 
self to a stupendous and world-wide campaign; he 
determined that he would carry that one message 
everywhere. He was forever on the march; and 
he was forever and ever proclaiming, with the, most 
affecting fervor and persuasion, that except a ‘man 
be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. 
David Garrick used to say that he would gladly 
give a hundred guineas to be able to pronounce the 
word ‘Oh! as movingly as Whitefield did. The 
secret was that all Whitefield’s soul was in that 
yearning monosyllable. He was hungry for the 
salvation of men. He remembered his own be- 
wilderment, his own frantic struggle for freedom; 
and he longed to shed upon others the light that had 
broken so startlingly and joyously upon him. He 
could scarcely speak of anything else. In preaching 
a funeral sermon soon after Mr. Whitefield’s death, 
the Rev. Joseph Smith, V.D.M., said that ‘there 
was scarcely one sermon in which Mr. Whitefield 
did not insist upon the necessity of the new birth. 
With passionate vehemency and earnest repetition 
he cried again and again: ‘Verily, verily, I say 
unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot 
see the kingdom of God. He found that the hearts 
of men were waiting wistfully for that message. 
He tells us, for example, of one of his earliest 
efforts. It was at Kingswood. He was refused 
permission to preach in the church unless he would 
undertake to say nothing about the new birth. But 


52 A Casket of Cameos 


that was the very subject on which he was deter- 
mined to speak. He therefore resorted to the open 
fields; and the miners, in their thousands, thronged 
around him. ‘I preached,’ he says, ‘on the Sav- 
iour’s words to Nicodemus, Ye must be born again; 
and the people heard me gladly. Having no right- 
eousness of their own to renounce, they were de- 
lighted to hear of One who came not to call the 
righteous but sinners to repentance. The first dis- 
covery of their being affected was to see the white 
gutters made by the tears which streamed plentifully 
down their black cheeks as they came fresh from 
the coalpit. Hundreds and hundreds of them were 
soon brought under deep convictions which happily 
ended in sound and thorough conversion. The 
change was visible to all.’ 

The news spread through the country that a cul- 
tured and eloquent preacher was declaring to great 
multitudes on village greens, at street corners, at 
fairs and fetes, at festivals, on bowling greens and 
in open fields that men might be remade, regen- 
erated, born again. ‘The inhabitants of towns that 
he had not yet visited sent to him, begging him to 
come. When, for example, he was approaching 
Bristol, multitudes went out on foot to meet him; 
and the people saluted and blessed him as he passed 
along the street. The churches were so crowded that 
it was with difficulty that he could obtain access to 
the pulpit. Some hung upon the rails of the organ- 
loft; others climbed upon the leads of the church; at 


Georze Whitefield’s Text 53 


every crack and crevice ears were straining to catch 
the message. When he preached his last sermon in 
the town, and told the people that they would see 
his face no more, they all—high and low, young 
and old—burst into tears. Multitudes followed him 
to his rooms weeping; the next day he was employed 
from daylight till midnight in counselling eager in- 
quirers; and, in the end, he left the town secretly 
at dead of night, in order to evade the throng that 
would have insisted on attending him. 


V 


George Whitefield made the doctrine of the new 
birth his universal message because he found that it 
met a universal need. I catch glimpses of him 
under many skies and under strangely varied con- 
ditions; but he is always proclaiming the same truth, 
and always with the same result. 

Here he is, seated with an Indian in a canoe on 
one of the great American rivers! He is visiting 
the various encampments of the Delawares. He 
loves to go from tribe to tribe, and from wigwam 
to wigwam, telling the red men, by the aid of an 
interpreter, that a man of any kind and any color 
may be born again. For hundreds of miles, he 
trudges his way through the solitudes of the great 
American forests that he may deliver to Indians and 
backwoodsmen the message that is burning in his 
soul. 

Here he is, preaching to the black men of Ber- 


54 A Casket of Cameos 


mudas! ‘Except,’ he cries, “except a man be born 
again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. ‘Atten- 
tion,’ he tells us, “sat on every face. I believe there 
were few dry eyes. Even the negroes who could 
not get into the building, and who listened from 
without, wept plentifully. Surely a great work is 
begun here!’ 

Here he is in Scotland! He is visiting Cambus- 
lang; and there is no building large enough to 
accommodate any considerable fraction of the 
crowds that throng to hear him. He therefore 
preaches in the glen. The grassy level by the burn- 
side, and the steep brae which rises from it in the 
form of an amphitheatre, offer a noble and im- 
pressive auditorium. “He dwelt mostly on Regener- 
ation, the record tells us. And the result vindicated 
his choice of a theme. On the last Sunday of his 
stay he preached to between thirty and forty 
thousand people, whilst over three thousand par- 
ticipated in the closing communion. 

Here he is in the Countess of Huntingdon’s 
drawing-room! The sumptuous apartment is 
thronged by princes and peers, philosophers and 
poets, wits and statesmen. To this select and aris- 
tocratic assembly he twice or thrice every week 
delivers his message. ‘Ye must be born again!’ he 
says; and he implores his titled hearers to seek the 
regenerating grace that can alone bring the joy of 
heaven into the experiences of earth. 

Here he is, bending over his desk. He is writing 


George Whitefield’s Text 55 


to Benjamin Franklin—‘the man who wrenched the 
sceptre from tyrants and the lightning from 
heaven.’ ‘I find,’ he says, ‘that you grow more and 
more famous in the learned world. As you have 
made such progress in investigating the mysteries 
of electricity, | now humbly urge you to give dili- 
gent heed to the mystery of the new birth. It isa 
most important and interesting study, and, when 
mastered, will richly repay you for your pains.’ 

I could change the scene indefinitely. But in 
every country, and under every condition, he is 
always expatiating on one tremendous theme: 

‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be 
born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God’ 

He cannot help it. When, at Oxford, he first 
discovered the necessity, and experienced the power, 
of the new birth, he could speak of nothing else. 
‘Whenever a fellow-student entered my room,’ he 
says, “I discussed with him our Lord’s words about 
being born again.’ For thirty years he preached 
night and day on the theme that had torn the 
shackles from his own soul. Towards the close of 
his Life of George Whitefield, Mr. J. P. Gledstone 
gives a list of the eminent preachers, poets and 
philanthropists who, together with countless thou- 
sands of less famous men, were led into the kingdom 
and service of Christ as a result of Mr. Whitefield’s 
extraordinary ministry. He often said that he 
should like to die in the pulpit, or immediately after 
leaving it; and he almost had his wish. He preached 


56 A Casket of Cameos 


the day before he died; and he remained true to 
his own distinctive message to the last. ‘I am now 
fifty-five years of age,’ he said, in one of these final 
addresses, ‘and I tell you that I am more than ever 
convinced that the truth of the new birth is a revela- 
tion from God Himself, and that without it you 
can never be saved by Jesus Christ.’ 

‘Why, Mr. Whitefield,’ inquired a friend one day, 
‘why do you so often preach on Ye must be born 
agam?’ 

‘Because,’ replied Mr. Whitefield, solemnly, look- 
ing full into the face of his questioner, “because /ye 
must be born again! 

That is conclusive. It leaves nothing more to be 
said! 


V 
CARDINAL NEWMAN'S TEXT 


I 


By some strange witchery peculiar to himself, John 
Henry Newman contrived to interest a whole nation 
in his own spiritual history. No man ever suc- 
ceeded as did he in making his soul’s secret struggle 
a matter of general conversation and popular ex- 
citement. It is difficult, at this distance of time, to 
understand the irresistible appeal that he made to 
the universal imagination, and the indisputable 
authority that he wielded over the public mind. For 
years his word counted for more than that of any 
other teacher: he was quite easily the greatest re- 
ligious genius of his time. For one thing, every- 
body seemed to know him: his very appearance 
was striking, magnetic, compelling. Anthony 
Froude, who knew him well, tells us that he was 
above the middle height, slight and spare. ‘His 
head was massive, his face remarkably like that of 
Julius Cesar. The forehead, the shape of the ears 
and nose as well as the lines of the mouth, were all 
peculiar, and I should say, exactly like Czsar’s. I 
have often thought of the resemblance and believe 
that it extended to the temperament. For he was 


57 


58 A Casket of Cameos 


imperious and wilful, although, along with these 
traits, his character was marked by a most engag- 
ing gentleness, sweetness and singleness of purpose.’ 
Even down to extreme old age, Mr. Froude says, 
he attracted and retained the passionate devotion of 
his friends and followers. 

His early history was familiar to every English- 
man. His wistful and pathetic pilgrimage—and 
especially the pilgrimage that enriched our litera- 
ture by the addition of Lead, Kindly Light—had 
been followed with breathless curiosity and deepen- 
ing compassion. And when, at length, he retired to 
Littlemore to settle the question on which every- 
thing depended, an entire people waited for his de- 
cision with the strained intensity with which, at 
other times, they await the result of a General Elec- 
tion or the issue of an important military engage- 
ment. In that modest cottage at Littlemore, the 
lonely thinker—shut up to his vigils and fastings 
and prayers—appeared to the multitude as a kind of 
intellectual Crusoe. Cut off from everything and 
everybody, he seemed the emblem of utter isolation. 
Men wondered whether deliverance would come to 
him, and, if so, how and when. The whole world 
knows how that grim struggle ended. ‘My dearest 
Pusey,’ he writes, in a letter that has become his- 
toric, and that bears the date October 8, 1845, “this 
will not go till all is over. This night I am expect- 
ing Father Dominic, the Passionist. I trust he will 
receive me into what I helieve to be the one and only 


Cardinal Newman’s Text 59 


Fold of the Redeemer. I do not expect it will take 
place before Friday.’ 

When the silver was creeping into his hair, Rob- 
inson ‘Crusoe revisited his island. When New- 
man was an old man, withered, and bent—perhaps 
also brokenhearted and disappointed—he paid a 
secret pilgrimage to Littlemore. He endeavored to 
evade recognition, ‘but the ctirate of the little place 
detected him. Mr. Lytton Strachey tells the touch- 
ing story. ‘As,’ he says, ‘the curate was passing by 
the church, he noticed an old man, very poorly 
dressed in an old grey coat, with the collar turned 
up, leaning over the lych-gate, in floods of tears. 
He was apparently in great trouble, and his hat was 
pulled down over his eyes, as if he wished to hide 
his features. For. a moment, however, he turned 
towards the curate, who was suddenly struck by 
something familiar in the face. Could it be ? 
A photograph hung over the curate’s mantelpiece 
of the man who had made Littlemore famous by his 
memorable sojourn there; he had never seen the 
original; but now, was it possible——? He looked 
again, and he could doubt no longer. It was Dr. 
Newman! He sprang forward with proffers of 
assistance. Could he be of any use? “Oh, no, no!’ 
was the reply. “Oh, no, no!’ But the curate felt 
that he could not turn away and leave so eminent a 
character in such distress. ‘Was it not Dr. New- 
man he had the honor of addressing?” he asked, 
with all the respect and sympathy at his command. 





60 A Casket of Cameos 


“Was there nothing that could be done?” But the 
old man hardly seemed to understand what was 
being said to him. “Oh, no, no!’ he repeated, with 
the tears streaming down his face. “Oh, no, no!’ 

It was not until many years after the crisis had 
passed that the story of that silent struggle at Little- 
more was fully told. The letter to Pusey was writ- - 
ten in 1845: the Apologia pro Vita Sua was pub- 
lished in 1864. Yet the interest of the people had 
not waned. Although he warned the nation that he 
had no romantic story to tell, the multitudes waited 
for his confessions with the avidity with which men 
await the thrilling narrative of a polar explorer. 
‘Not the Letters of Pascal,’ says Dr. William Barry, 
‘nor those of Junius, won more instant success. The 
Apologia appeared in all hands, was read in clubs, 
in drawing-rooms, at street corners, on the tops of 
omnibuses, and in railway trains; and everywhere 
the person of the author was discussed and his pa- 
thetic and striking sentences quoted.’ And why? 
Dr. Barry gives the reason. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘instead 
of a fresh volume added to the interminable stores 
of controversy, was a life, revealed in its innermost 
workings, the heart put under a glass that made it 
transparent. It had been Rousseau’s boast that he 
would do this unparalleled thing; he would reveal 
his secret soul; and he did it—at what a cost to 
the decencies of human reticence, to the laws of 
friendship, to the claims of gratitude! Newman, 
observing a punctilious self-respect, nor making free 


Cardinal Newman’s Text 61 


with any other man’s reputation, set up in the 
Temple of Fame this tablet, on which all might read 
the story of his days, anticipating, said Mr. Glad- 
stone, whom it awed and overcame, the last great 
Judgment itself.’ 

Here, then, is Cardinal Newman, one of the 
strangest and saddest figures in our history! To 
the end of his days he was a child of the twilight. 
The ‘encircling gloom’ was ever about him: he was 
always ‘far from home.” He was, it has been truly 
said, a pilgrim of eternity; but he was a pilgrim 
making his way ‘o’er moor and fen, o’er crag and 
torrent till the mght 1s gone. Wewas never at home 
in Protestantism; and the Church in whose lap he 
pillowed his throbbing brows left his heart still 
hungry. Yet, through the intervening mists, he 
saw far off the white glimmer of sunshine; through 
the encircling gloom he dimly beheld the Kindly 
Light. What was it? We shall see. 


I] 


I was talking one day to an old ministerial friend 
—the Rev. Charles Bright, of South Australia— 
who told me a story concerning Newman, which, so 
far as I can discover, has never been printed before. 
Mr. Bright was, many years ago, a minister at Bir- 
mingham; and, in those days, Cardinal Newman 
was in residence at the Oratory at Edgbaston, near 
by. Mr. Bright was one evening spending an hour 
with a brother-minister named Walters, who, with 


62 A Casket of Cameos 


his wife, had been holiday-making in South Wales. 
In the course of their tour, Mr. and Mrs. Walters 
stayed at Llandudno; and the landlady at whose 
house they engaged rooms, on discovering that they 
came from Birmingham, told them that, among her 
boarders, she had a Mr. Charles Newman, whose 
brother was a celebrated Roman Catholic priest in 
the city from which they had just come. Charles 
Newman was a poor fellow of feeble health, wan- 
dering intellect and grotesque hallucinations. He 
was for many years the anxiety and the burden of 
his celebrated brother. 

‘But,’ continued Mr. Walters, ‘the woman told 
us that she had a letter from the priest at Birming- 
ham, and also a letter from another brother—Pro- 
fessor F. W. Newman—who lived at Bath. I asked 
her if she would mind showing me these letters. 
She said that she would be delighted, and seemed 
gratified at my interest. The letter from John 
Henry Newman, the priest, revealed deep concern 
for the welfare of his frail brother, and requested 
her to be sure to supply him with all that he required 
in the way of comfort and nourishment. He begged 
her, further, to bring the subject of Christianity 
as earnestly as possible under his brother’s notice. 
If, he said, there was a Roman Catholic priest in 
or near Llandudno, he would like his brother to be 
visited by him. If, however, no priest was avail- 
able, or if his brother should object to seeing such 
a priest, she was to do her best to induce him to 


Cardinal Newman’s Text 63 


receive the ministrations of a clergyman of the 
Church of England. Should the invalid refuse to 
see even an Anglican clergyman, she was herself to 
bring the deep need of his empty soul home to him 
in the best way known to her. “And whatever else 
you do, or fail to do,’ added the priest at Edgbaston, 
“vou are to be sure to read to him the fifty-third 
chapter of the prophecy of Isaiah.’ The letter from 
F, W. Newman simply urged her to secure for his 
brother every comfort and attention. I asked her,’ 
continued Mr. Walters, ‘if the letters were of any 
use to her. She saw my meaning at once, and said 
that “if I cared to have them, I was very welcome.” ’ 

‘Mr. Walters brought the letters away with him,’ 
Mr. Bright told me, ‘and he pasted them in a book. 
And, during the evening that I spent at his house, he 
produced them and showed them to me.’ 


Lh 


‘Whatever else you do, or fail to do, says the 
Cardinal, “you are to be sure to read to him the fifty- 
third chapter of the prophecy of Isaiah, 

The fifty-third of Isaiah! 1 can see the good 
landlady sitting in the room of her afflicted boarder, 
and from the Bible she reads to him the great words 
that his eminent brother has prescribed. Listen! 

He was despised and rejected of men; a Man of 
Sorrows and acquainted with grief ; and we hid as tt 
were our faces from Him; He was despised and we 
esteemed Him not. 


64 A Casket of Cameos 


Surely He hath borne our gniefs and carried our 
sorrows; yet we did esteem Him stricken, smiiten of 
God and atilicted. 

But He was wounded for our transgressions; He 
was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of 
our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we 
are healed. 

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have 
turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath 
laid on Him the imquity of us all. 

‘Whatever else you do, or fail to do, you are to be 
sure to read to him the fifty-third of Isaiah’ ‘That 
insistence upon the fifty-third of Isaiah convinces 
me that, through the encircling gloom, Newman 
fixed his tired eyes upon the Kindly Light. Beyond 
the controversies and obscurities of Protestantism 
and Romanism, he saw the Man of Sorrows, de- 
spised and rejected and acquainted with grief. 


IV 


‘The fifty-third chapter of Isaiah,’ said Pusey, to 
whom that famous letter from Littlemore was writ- 
ten, ‘the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah is an antidote 
to the bitterness of any sorrow.’ 

The Ethiopian eunuch thought so. He was com- 
passed about by the sorrows of Ignorance. ‘How 
can I understand,’ he cried, “except some man teach 
me?’ And Philip stepped up into his chariot and 
expounded to him the fifiy-third of Isaiah! ‘Of 
whom speaketh the prophet this? of himself or of 


Cardinal Newman’s Text 65 


some other man?’ asked the perplexed eunuch, as 
he read of the Man of Sorrows, despised and re- 
jected. ‘And Philip began at that same Scripture 
and preached unto him Jesus. And, as a result, the 
eunuch went on his way rejoicing! The fifty-third 
of Isaiah had proved, as Dr. Pusey says, the anti- 
dote to the bitterness of his sorrow. 

The Earl of Rochester thought so. He was 
plunged in the sorrows of Scepticism. Macaulay, 
in his History of England, speaks of Rochester’s 
reclamation from atheism as one of the most signal 
triumphs of Bishop Gilbert Burnet. Yet the Bishop 
only did for the Earl what the evangelist did for 
the eunuch. He expounded to him the fifty-tlird of 
Isaiah. “The Earl avowed, in pale astonishment, 
that the verses contained an accurate account of the 
life, character, trial, death and resurrection of the 
crucified Saviour. He thought it as plain as the 
history of Him given in the gospels.’ 

John Coleridge Patteson thought so; and, be- 
cause he thought so, he devoted himself to his mis- 
sionary life and died his martyr death. He was op- 
pressed by the sorrows of Sin. As a little boy, he 
said that he should like to be a clergyman, because 
he thought that saying the Absolution to people 
must make them very happy. His first sermon, he 
used to tell his mother, should be on the fifty-third 
of Isaah. He felt, as Pusey felt, that it would be 
the best antidote to the bitterness of sin’s sorrows. 

Philip Melancthon thought so. His heart was 


66 A Casket of Cameos 


heavy with the sorrows of Farewell. The frailty 
of his body was compelling him to abandon his 
work. On the last Good Friday of his life, he went 
down to the University at Wittenberg and delivered 
his final address. And he chose as his theme the 
fifty-third of Isaiah! 

John Knox thought so. He was encircled by the 
sorrows of Death. And, during that last illness, he 
asked that the fifty-third of Isaiah should be read 
to him every day. 

“Whatever else you do or fail to do,’ says New- 
man, the writer of that letter from Littlemore, ‘you 
are to be sure to read to him the fifty-third chapter 
of the prophecy of Isaiah, 

‘For the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, says Pusey, 
to whom that letter from Littlemore was addressed, 
‘is an antidote to the bitterness of any sorrow.’ 

But why? Why is Newman so anxious that the 
fifty-third of Isaah should be read to his brother? 
And why is Pusey so sure that the fifty-third of 
Isaiah is an antidote to the bitterness of any sorrow? 
It is Bunyan’s Greatheart who has given us the most 
satisfying answer to these questions. 

The pilgrims had enjoyed to the full the boun- 
teous hospitality of good Mr. Gaius; and, before 
taking leave of him, they brought their felicity to a 
climax by joining in family worship. Christiana 
asked her son James to read a chapter, so he read 
the fifty-third of Isaiah. When he had finished, Mr. 
Honest asked why it was said of the Saviour that 


Cardinal Newman’s Text 67 


‘He had no form nor comeliness. “The words are 
spoken,’ replied Mr. Greatheart, ‘concerning those 
who lack the eye that can see into our Prince’s heart.’ 

That is very striking. Newman’s biographer has 
told us that, by means of his Apologia, the Cardinal 
puts his heart under a microscope, so that every man 
can read it through and through. The fifty-third of 
Isaiah does for Newman’s Saviour what the 
Apologia does for Newman. It enables us to peer 
into our Prince’s very heart. 


V 


I have only heard of one person, in all the ages, to 
whose stricken soul the fifty-third of Isaiah brought 
no comfort at all; and that exception was a woman. 
For her the fifty-third of Isaiah gleamed with no 
Kindly Light: it was black with the darkness of 
midnight. The fifty-third of Isaiah was no antidote 
to the bitterness of her sorrow: it was sorrow’s 
crown of sorrow. Mary, the mother of Jesus, it is 
said, could never bear to read the fifty-third of 
Isaiah herself, and she would never let her Divine 
Son read it. It was like a knife in her heart when- 
ever she caught sight of the sublime passage. But 
the reason that made it as bitter as wormwood to 
her is the reason that has made it, to us, the foun- 
tain of all consolation and grace. For it was to her 
what it is to us—a glimpse into the heart that was 
to be broken at last upon the bitter Cross. 


/ VI 
MARK SABRE’S TEXT 


I 


Mark Sasre wanted something. He could not tell 
anybody what it was that he wanted, for he did not 
know. He only knew that he carried in his heart a 
ceaseless hunger, an indescribable craving, an ach- 
ing void. It is Mr. A. S. M. Hutchinson who, in 
If Winter Comes, tells his story; and that 1s how 
Mr. Hutchinson summarises his hero’s spiritual des- 
titution. And, in so summarising it, he displays a 
penetrating and practical insight. Here and there, 
as we go through life, we meet with a man who 
groans beneath a load of guilt; he feels, like Bun- 
yan’s pilgrim, that his burden is heavier than he can 
bear; and he longs for deliverance. He wants to 
get rid of something. But, for each such case, we 
meet with a dozen who are vaguely conscious that 
life is lacking; they are ashamed of their inner pov- 
erty; they think wistfully of the treasure in which 
others exult; they grope blindly but eagerly for that 
for which they would gladly sacrifice every penny 
they possess. They feel that they need something. 
So was it with Mark Sabre. 

‘We are all plugging about like mad because we 
are all looking for something! he said to himself 

68 


Mark Sabre’s Text 69 


one morning, as he leaned back in his office chair, 
and yielded himself to his reflections. ‘We are all 
looking for something. You can read it in half the 
faces you see. Some*wanting—and knowing they 
are wanting-—something. Others wanting some- 
thing, but just putting up with it; content to be dis- 
contented. You can see it. And what is it that 
they are all looking for? It’s some universal thing 
that’s wanting—something that religion ought to 
give, but doesn’t!’ 

Here then is the problem, or, rather, here are the 
two problems. The first is Browning’s problem: 





Wanting is what? 
Summer redundant. 
Blueness abundant 

Where is the blot? 





Mark Sabre feels that, for lack of that mysterious 
something whatever that something may be, life has 
become confused, involved, tangled, out of control. 
There are three women in the story, Mabel, Nona 
and Effie. He is married to Mabel. They have 
nothing in common; they do not seriously attempt to 
understand each other; no love is lost between them. 
He is whole-heartedly in love with Nona, and she 
with him; but Nona is the wife of Lord Tybar. 
Mark is determined that, come what may, his love 
for Nona shall never degrade or dishonor her. If 
he cannot help her upward, he will never drag her 
downward. He is resolved to play the game. But 


40 A Casket of Cameos 


the struggle is terrific. And he feels that, if only 
that elusive and mysterious something had come into 
his life at the start, this hideous complication would 
have been averted. Life would have been under the 
sway of a master-principle. Even now, if he could 
but welcome that something into his heart, he might 
be saved from shipwreck. He throws himself back 
in his chair and reviews the situation. 

Wanting is—what?—that is the first problem. 
And, when he has discovered what he needs, whence 
shall he obtain it ?—that is the second. 


it 


Mark Sabre sought that evasive something in two 
directions; but he found abiding satisfaction in 
neither. 

It occurred to him that Friendship is one of the 
purest joys of life. He noticed that the hungry look 
that he saw in people’s eyes vanished when they 
opened their hearts in confident, congenial com- 
munion with each other. It was so in his own case. 
‘Tow very glad his friends were to see him! It 
was as though he brought them something—some- 
thing very pleasurable to them and that they much 
wanted. Certainly he, for his own part, received 
such from them: a sense of warmth, a kindling of 
the spirit, a glowing of all his affections and per- 
ceptions. His mind would explore curiously this 
train of thought. He came to determine that in- 
finitely the most beautiful thing in life was a face: 


Mark Sabre’s Text nT 


lighting up with the pleasure of friendship.’ He re- 
membered that wanting something look in the faces 
of half the people he saw; and he fancied that, by 
the rapture of friendship, even the weariest and most 
wistful faces were transfigured. 

This was a hint: but only a hint. It did not carry 
him far. On reflection ‘he felt that it was not en- 
tirely the secret. The friendly greeting passed: the 
light faded from the face: the wanting returned. 
The thing lacking was something that would fix it, 
render it permanent, establish it in the being as the 
heart is rooted in the body. Something? What?’ 
This leads him to his second venture. 

He wonders if it is Faith that he requires. ‘Why 
is it, he asks himself, ‘that children’s faces are 
always happy? There’s something they must lose 
as they grow out of childhood. It’s not that cares 
and troubles come: it is that something is Jost. Well, 
what had I as a child that I have not as a man? 
Would it be hope? Would it be faith? Would it 
be belief?’ Or are these three the same? It sets 
him thinking. He turns to the Churches; but, some- 
how, the Churches fail to satisfy him. He takes his 
friend, Hapgood, into his confidence. 

‘I tell you, Hapgood,’ he says, ‘that plumb down 
in the crypt and abyss of every man’s soul is a 
hunger, a craving for other food than any earthly 
stuff. And the Churches know it; but instead of 
reaching down to him what he wants—light, light— 
instead of that they invite him to dancing and pic- 


72 A Casket of Cameos 


ture shows, and you're a jolly good fellow, and re- 
ligion’s a jolly fine thing and no spoil-sport, and all 
that sort of latter-day tendency. Why, man, he can 
get all that outside the Churches, and get it better. 
Light, light! He wants light, Hapgood. And the 
padres come down and drink beer with him, and 
dance jazz with him, and call it making religion a 
Living Thing in the Lives of the People. Lift the 
hearts of the people to God, they say, by showing 
them that religion is not incompatible with having 
a jolly fine time. And there’s no God there that 
aman can understand for lim to be lifted to. WHap- 
good, a man wouldn’t care what he had to give up 
if he knew he was making for something inestim- 
ably precious. But he doesn’t know. Light, light 
—that’s what he wants; and the longer it’s withheld, 
the lower he'll sink. Light! Light? 

And so Society fails him! And the Churches fail 
him! And all the while the hunger of his heart for 
that mysterious something—the something that he 
feels he lacks—is growing. And all the while the 
struggle becomes more fierce and terrible. Every- 
thing goes wrong at the office. Everything goes 
wrong at home. The sympathies of life weaken: 
the temptations of life strengthen: and still he is 
without that something that would transform a 
nebulous Chaos into an orderly Creation. 


Ii] 


The great discovery, as he called it, broke sud- 


Mark Sabre’s Text "3 


denly upon him. The first hint of it came from 
Effie. Effie was a simple-hearted girl for whom he 
had obtained a situation as companion to an old lady 
whose son had gone tothe war. Effie, Mr. Hutchin- 
son tells us, was always happy. Nothing of that 
qwanting-something look was ever to be seen in 
Effie’s shining eyes; she had the secret of life. 
Watching her face while they talked, Sabre came 
to believe that the secret, the thing missing in half 
the faces he saw, was love; but—the old difficulty— 
many had love and yet were troubled. One evening 
he asked Effie a most extraordinary question, shot 
out of him without intending it; discharged out of 
his questioning thoughts as by a hidden spring sud- 
denly touched by groping fingers. 

‘Effie, do you love God?’ 

‘Why, of course I do, Mr. Sabre,’ Effie answered 
in surprise. 

‘Why do you?’ 

She was utterly at a loss. ‘Of course I do!’ she 
said again. 

“Yes,’ he replied rather sharply, “but why? Have 
you ever asked yourself why? Respecting, fearing, 
trusting; that’s understandable. But love! You 
_know what love is, don’t you? What's love got to 
do with God?’ 

In simple wonderment, as though she had been 
asked what had the sun to do with light, or 
whether water was wet, she answered, ‘Why, God 
is love! 


74 A Casket of Cameos 


He stared at her. It was the first ray of clear 
sunshine that had broken upon him; and it startled 
him. 

The grey dawn soon ripened into golden daylight. 
In the crisis of his career, when an avalanche of 
tragedies was overwhelming him, he again opened 
his heart to Hapgood. 

‘Hapgood,’ he exclaimed, his face flushed with 
excitement, ‘I’ve got the secret! I’ve got the key 
to the riddle that’s been puzzling me all my life. 
I’ve got the new revelation in terms good enough 
for me to understand! I’ve got the light! Here it 
is: God is—love! Not this, that, nor the other 
that the intelligence revolts at, and puts aside, and 
goes away, and goes on hungering, hungering and 
unsatisfied; nothing like that; but just this: plain 
for a child, clear as daylight for grown intelligence: 
God is—love! Listen to this, Hapgood: He that 
dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him; 
for God 1s love! Isn’t that a revelation? It ex- 
plains everything to me. I can reduce all the mys- 
teries to terms of that.’ 

And Hapgood tells us that through all the des- 
perate days that followed—days of blackness im- 
penetrable and of anguish unutterable—Sabre held 
on to that. ‘He’d got this great discovery of his. 
Badly down as he was, at least he’d got that!’ 

‘He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and 
God in him; for God is love’: that is Mark Sabre’s 
text. 


Mark Sabre’s Text ”s 


IV 


I am not surprised. It is an exquisite phrase. He 
that dwelleth in love—that builds his nest in love— 
that makes his home im love! Let me call a pair of 
witnesses—Samuel Rutherford and Dr. Jowett. 

‘He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God.’ ‘O 
Sir,’ exclaims Samuel Rutherford, writing to Col- 
onel Ker in 1653, “O Sir, what a house that must be! 
What is it to dwell in*fove—to live in God? How 
far are some from this, their house and home! How 
ill acquaint with the rooms, mansions, safety and 
sweetness of holy security to be found in God! 
When shall we attain to living in Him only— 
dwelling in love; residing in God?’ 

‘He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God’ 
“What a home!’ exclaims Dr. J. H. Jowett. ‘This 
_ home of the soul surpasses anything and everything 
for its loveliness and grace. Dwelleth in love! 
Dwelleth in God! There is nothing in nature which 
will provide an analogy gracious enough to carry the 
treasure. The soul which dwells in love radiates 
love. It looks out of its windows and has a feast 
of loveliness. It has a wonderful magic, and even 
deformed things begin to be transformed. If you 
would understand this magic and experience, change 
your address, and take up your home in love, for 
he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, for God 
1s love!’ 

The whole point of Mr. Hutchinson’s book is that 


76 A Casket of Cameos 


Mark Sabre actually entered into this celestial ex- 
perience. He took up his residence in the love of 
God and caught the atmosphere of that divine 
dwelling-place. 


V 


I have said that everything went wrong with 
Sabre at the office and at home. Calamity followed 
hard upon the heels of calamity: tragedy after 
tragedy came thundering down upon him. Some- 
body had committed a great and terrible sin: some- 
body had driven poor Effie to a dreadful crime. 
Who was that somebody? With cruel unanimity, 
all the circumstances pointed to Sabre as the cul- 
prit; and, on the strength of that avalanche of evi- 
dence, Mabel had no difficulty in divorcing him. 

At the office, there was a man whose heart ex- 
tended its hospitality to a pitiless hate and a pas- 
sionate love. It is wonderful how often those two 
opposites dwell together. Twyning, a partner in 
the firm, hated Sabre with a hate that was.as cruel 
as death; and he loved his own boy—Harold Twyn- 
ing—with an affection that was almost idolatry. 
Harold enlisted and went to the war. Whilst he 
was away in France, his father—not knowing that 
Sabre had offered for service and been rejected— 
kept up a running fire of biting sarcasms and sneer- 
ing insinuations. And, mixing his love with his 
hate, he would mutter to himself in between whiles: 
‘My Harold! My Harold! Nobody knows what 





Mark Sabre’s Text 77 


Harold is to me! He’s all the world to me; my 
boy, my boy! MHe’s a better man than his father, 
a far better man! He’s a good Christian, is Harold! 
He’s never had a bad thought or said a bad word! 
My Harold! My Harold! 


VI 


Then comes the sensation that forms the climax 
of the book. In the back of the clock—a place in 
which Effie used often to secrete things—Sabre finds 
a letter. It is addressed to him, and establishes his 
innocence completely! The guilty somebody was 
Harold Twyning! Harold was the father of Efhe’s 
child. The evidence in the divorce case was a tissue 
of false assumptions. It was Harold who had 
driven poor Effie to the murder of her babe and to 
suicide. 

Sabre reads the letter again and again. He thinks 
of the stinging sarcasms to which he has been ex- 
posed at the office. He rises and mimics Twyning. 
‘Harold’s such a good boy—never said a bad word 
or had a bad thought—such a good Christian model 
boy? He determines to rush off to the office and 
show the letter to Twyning at once. ‘He’s hounded 
me to hell,’ he says: ‘at the very gates of hell, I’ve 
got him: Ill cram the letter down his throat!’ 
His enemy, he feels, has been delivered into his 
hands! 

He bursts into the office. Twyning sits at his 
desk, his head buried in his hands. At his elbows, 


78 A Casket of Cameos 


vivid upon the black expanse of the table, lies a torn 
envelope, dull red. 

‘Twyning,’ he begins, ‘I’ve come to speak to you 
about your son!’ 

‘Oh, Sabre; so you've heard! It was good of 
you to come, Sabre; I feel it! He’s killed! My 
Harold! My boy! my boy, Harold! Oh, Sabre, 
such a good Christian boy! And he’s gone; he’s 
gone! Never to see him again; never again!’ He 
began to sob. His head fell once more upon his 
hands; and Sabre strolled across to the fireplace. 
He was crumpling the letter in his hands. Stoop- 
ing down, he held it over the flames—the letter that, 
of all things, alone declared his innocence. /Vith 
that letter he could look the whole world in the face 
and hurl his worst enemies to confusion. Without 
that letter he stood convicted and condemned in the 
sight of all men. He remembered his text: 

He that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God 
in him; for God 1s love. 

‘He opened his fingers,’ Mr. Hutchinson says, ‘and 
the crumpled letter was consumed. He went over 
and patted Twyning’s heaving shoulders: “There, 
there, Twyning; bear up; bear up! Soldier’s death! 
Fine boy! Died for his country! Bad luck, Twyn- 
ing!” Twyning clutched his hand and squeezed 
it convulsively.’ They parted, and Sabre went out 
to face the scowls of society. 

Meanwhile, Nona, too, had been chastened by 
suffering and purified by trial. Her husband, 


Mark Sabre’s Text 79 


whom she had come whole-heartedly to admire, had 
won the Victoria Cross and fallen at the front. 
When all the world turned its back upon Mark 
Sabre, she believed in him. She came to him at 
last; and, together, they entered into a felicity that 
they could never have known but for the tempta- 
tions that they had resisted and the sufferings they 
had endured. 


Vil 


Mark Sabre is not a perfect character. He is 
tactless, stupid, awkward. He has a genius for 
blundering. But, once he comes within the ambit 
of the love of God, his personality is irradiated and 
transfigured. 

‘Love ...God... the love of God... God is 
love? Did not the love of God reach its climax 
when He, the just, died for us, the unjust? He 
who knew no sin became the Lamb of God, bearing 
away the sins of the world. The innocent suffered 
for the guilty. So was it with Mark Sabre. When 
Sabre made his home in the love of God he became 
infected by the sacrificial spirit and fragrant atmos- 
phere of that sublime abode. 


Vil 
ROBERT LAMB’S TEXT 
I 


Rospert LAMB was a very gallant gentleman; and a 
very gallant Australian gentleman at that. In order 
that death might not deprive him of the privilege of 
repeating his text—the text that he had expounded 
with such delight, first to the savages of the South 
Seas, and then to the swagmen of Australia—he 
designed his own tombstone. That tombstone of his 
is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It is one of 
the most eloquent and one of the most pathetic mon- 
uments to be found in the southern hemisphere. It 
stands at the corner of a tiny bush burying-place, 
tucked away among the giant mountains of New 
South Wales; yet, by means of that roadside memo- 
rial, Robert Lamb goes on repeating his text every 
day of his deathless life. ‘It is,’ as Mr. J. A. Packer 
says, “a typical bush cemetery, overrun with weeds 
and heather, as though no man or woman, much less 
a sexton, ever gave it a thought. Few visitors to 
the district go out of their way to inspect it; fewer 
still of the many tourists who flash by in motor- 
cars give ita second glance. Yet, hidden away here 
in the heart of the mountains, swept by the westerly 
winds, curtained by the enveloping mists, and wept 
80 


Robert Lamb’s Text Sr 


over by the rain-drops from the overarching gum 
trees, is the resting-place of one of the greatest and 
best men that this new land has known,’ 

If, fifty years before this bush burial took place, 
you had stood on the spot that the monument now 
occupies, you would have seen a pair of tired and 
travel-stained pilgrims trudging wearily along the 
dusty road. They are a young man and woman, 
husband and wife. They are built of that stout stuff 
of which the pioneers are always made. They have 
ambitions, these two, but their dreams are based on 
their willingness to suffer and to toil. Their swags 
are strapped to their shoulders. Attracted by the 
stories they have heard of the opening of new agri- 
cultural areas in New Zealand, they have made up 
their minds to try their fortunes there. The day of 
railway trains has not yet dawned: there is nothing 
for it but to trudge their way over mountain and 
plain to the ship that will soon be sailing from Syd- 
ney. But the road seems interminable. They turn 
the bend where the tomb now stands and begin to 
climb the hill. Did no strange surge of unaccount- 
able emotion sweep over them, I wonder, as they 
glanced at that grassy plot beside the road? Did 
the woman catch her breath? Did the man’s heart, 
just for a moment, seem to stand still? For they 
reached New Zealand, these two, and prospered 
there. There, too, a little boy was born to them. 
And, fifty years after they dragged their blistered 
feet along this endless road, that son of theirs— 


82 A Casket of Cameos 


greatly beloved and held in the highest honor—came 
to these rugged mountains to ask of them a grave. 
And, as his pitiless disease wore him down, his 
thoughts flew back, almost hourly, to those two 
brave pilgrims who, a few years before his birth, 
had sanctified this dusty road for him by tramping 
along it in the course of their great and gallant 
venture. The vision suggested to him the beautiful 
ministry by which his sunset days were adorned; 
and it suggested to him the means by which he might 
go on for centuries repeating to every wayfarer 
his test. 


{I 


If, five years before that bush burial took place, 
you had stood on the spot that the monument now 
occupies, you would have seen two men, engaged in 
earnest conversation, sitting on a log by the side of 
the road. The log is there still: a photograph of it 
lies before meas I write. One of the men is a swag- 
man, his swag is strapped to his shoulders; his billy 
stands against the tuft of grass at his feet. He is an 
arresting and picturesque figure; yet it is not to him, 
but to his companion, that I wish to direct particu- 
lar attention. For this is Dr. Robert Lamb; M.A. 
of the University of New Zealand; M.B., Ch.M., 
and B.D. of the University of Edinburgh; one of 
the most cultured, one of the most modest, and one 
of the most lovable of men. Look at him! Al- 
though his consumption is beginning to play havoc. 


Robert Lamb’s Text 83 


with his handsome form, he is still tall, well-knit and 
finely-proportioned. ‘His face, with its well-trimmed 
black beard, wore a most beautiful expression,’ 
writes one who knew him well. ‘He had earnest 
hazel eyes, clear and kind, in which a fondness for 
fun seemed to be perpetually lurking. His fore- 
head was lofty, giving an impression of immense 
intellectual resources. He was quiet and unob- 
trusive; his voice soft and persuasive; his step quick, 
his figure alert, and he himself the essence of gentle- 
ness, geniality and good temper.’ This, then, is 
Robert Lamb. What of his story? And his text? 
II 

His story is soon told. The New Zealand farmer’s 
boy—the son of those two travel-worn wayfarers 
that we saw vanishing over the crest of the hill— 
early displayed a restless curiosity and an insatiable 
thirst for knowledge. In studying for his degree he 
often wondered what he should do with the learn- 
ing that he was so toilfully acquiring and with the 
powers that he was developing in the process. Then, 
one evening, at a great meeting held in St. Paul’s 
Presbyterian Church, Christchurch, New Zealand— 
a church that I know well—he heard the Rev. Joseph 
Copeland plead for men who, at any hazard, would 
devote their lives to the evangelization of the New 
Hebrides. Mr. Copeland stirred the boy’s fancy, 
fired his enthusiasm, and awoke in his heart a pas- 
sionate desire to carry the message of light and 


84 A Casket of Cameos 


life to the untutored barbarians who sat in darkness 
and in the shadow of death. His resolve lent new 
zest and significance to all his studies. He went on 
to Edinburgh; took the divinity and medical courses 
simultaneously ; and, overtaxing his brilliant powers, 
paved the way for the malady that hurried him to 
an early grave. 

He was nearly thirty when at last he reached the 
islands. He was appointed to Ambrym, a position 
of special peril. The natives had an ugly record; 
but Robert Lamb embraced the opportunity with 
unbounded delight. It really seemed, however, as 
if, from the very moment of his arrival, all things 
were conspiring to bring about his discomfiture and 
overthrow. ‘I was privileged to be in close touch 
with him in those days,’ says the Rev. A. J. Fraser. 
‘What his trials and sorrows were are known to 
few; but those few will always remember through 
what a fiery furnace Robert Lamb passed, and how 
the nobility of his character shone through it all.’ 
Fever distressed him terribly from the very outset. 
“There is so much to be done,’ he writes, ‘and I must 
go on as long as my poor legs can trot my hot 
cranium round!’ He drove away his worries with 
a merry laugh; but, like a pack of hungry wolves, 
they crept stealthily back upon him. Sickness fol- 
lowed sickness, and trouble trod upon the heels of 
trouble, until, in March, 1893, the culminating 
calamity swooped down upon him. A frightful 
hurricane devastated the island; the mission station 


Robert Lamb’s Text 85 


was completely wrecked ; and his twin boys—Castor 
and Pollux, as he playfully called them—were killed. 
He bore his anguish bravely. With a smiling face 
he breasted the blows of circumstance and worked 
night and day to repair the pitiful havoc that the 
storm had wrought. He won the hearts of natives 
and missionaries alike. Many a time he rose from 
his own sick-bed at dead of night to tend and 
alleviate another’s pain. “By black men and by 
white,’ says Dr. Marden, ‘Robert Lamb was greatly 
beloved. Few will be able to estimate the value of 
his work in the islands, so great was it. To my 
knowledge, even to this day, the natives regard him 
as some great soul who had been specially sent down 
to them straight from the presence of God.’ The 
pity of it was that his stay was so brief. What with 
the cruel climate and the desolating calamities, his 
health was swiftly undermined. To his unspeak- 
able sorrow, and to the grief of all upon the islands, 
he was compelled, after a few years’ ministry, to 
bid his South Sea savages a heart-breaking fare- 
well. Hecame back to Australia to die. 


IV 


The last years of his life were spent at Went- 
worth Falls, in the Blue Mountains, close to the 
little cemetery in which we have already seen his 
tomb. To this day the people of the place speak of 
his sojourn there in the reverential tones in which 
they would tell of some hallowed and beautiful tradi- 


7 


86 A Casket of Cameos 


tion. Although so pitifully frail, he was the friend 
of everybody; his kindnesses were countless; and 
his medical skill was ever at the disposal of the poor. 
Moreover, it was among these mountains that he 
imposed upon himself that lovely sunset ministry 
of his—his ministry to the swagmen. The swag- 
man cuts a picturesque figure in Australian life and 
literature. He is the gipsy of the south. Roderic 
Quinn has described him: ‘With no companion, 
except, perhaps, a dog trotting at his heels, he 
trudges up and down road and track and route, 
through drought and flood, fair weather and foul, 
from year’s end to year’s end. Attuned to the vast 
distances and the vast silences in which he moves 
and has his being, he lives and dreams, indifferent 
to the clamor of the great, weary, working world 
which he has left behind him.’ Everybody in Aus- 
tralia knows the swagman. 

Sitting by the side of the road, watching hundreds 
of these men go by, Dr. Lamb’s thoughts flew back 
across the years, and he seemed to see that pair of 
tired pilgrims as, half a century before, they passed 
this very spot. These men who now tramped their 
way along the dusty road were just as friendless and 
just as cheerless as those two wayfarers whose 
memory was so dear to him. Could he do nothing 
to make the lives of these wanderers less drab? 
Sauntering along the road, he came upon the log at 
the corner of the cemetery, and resolved to make it 
his headquarters. In those days it lay under the 


Robert Lamb’s Text 847 


pleasant shade of a fine old tree, which has since 
been removed to make way for the electric wires. 
The situation had the advantage of being at the 
bend of the road. He could see a good distance in 
both directions, and be prepared worthily to enter- 
tain a coming guest. Here, morning by morning, 
he took up his station, waiting for his swagmen to 
approach him. In one pocket he carried a few 
packets of cigarettes, plugs of tobacco and boxes 
of matches; the other bulged out with its stock of 
New Testaments. Whenever a swagman came 
along the road, the doctor asked him to share his 
log. Offering him a smoke, he soon engaged his 
visitor in delightful conversation. The doctor 
would listen sympathetically to the recital of the 
swagman’s experiences; and then, in his turn, he 
would electrify and enthrall his companion by de- 
scribing his own adventures on the islands and at 
sea. Then, very deftly, the doctor would turn the 
conversation to still loftier themes. He would 
present his new acquaintance with a copy of the 
New Testament, and would read to him the Sav- 
iour’s gracious invitation to the weary and the 
heavy-laden. For, if anybody knows what it is to 
be weary and heavy-laden, the swagman does. 

For some months, the doctor climbed the hill 
every morning and walked back every night. Then, 
his strength slowly ebbing, he engaged a barouche 
from the village inn to drive him to his log after 
breakfast; but, with the aid of a stick, he still man- 


88 A Casket of Cameos 


aged to walk back to his home in the dusk. Later 
still, however, he had to engage the barouche for 
both journeys. And then the stern logic of events 
forced him to face another problem. It was clear 
that the old log under the gum-tree would soon see 
him for the last time. How, he asked himself, how 
could he continue his work when compelled to lie 
in his bed—or in his grave? He had refused to be 
daunted by a relentless disease. Disappointed in the 
islands, he had found work to do in the mountains. 
Why should he permit a premature death to inter- 
rupt the programme of his life? With splendid dar- 
ing, he hurled defiance at the powers of death. He 
challenged the finality of the tomb. And the records 
show that his audacity was magnificently vindicated. 


Vv 


The time soon came when he could not leave his 
bed. It was then that he asked for paper and de- 
signed his tombstone—the tombstone with the text. 
He ordained that it was to stand at the corner of 
the cemetery, close to the log on which he had so 
often sat. It was to be a noble piece of masonry, 
capable of enduring for centuries. On the east and 
the west and the south sides of it, there were to be 
inscribed his name, the names of his twin boys, and 
several appropriate passages of Scripture. But on 
the north side—the side facing the road—the side 
that every passing swagman would see—there were 
to be inscribed these striking and impressive words, 


Robert Lamb’s Text 89 


COME UNTOUCMEV ALIN VE GHAT) 
LABOR AND ARE HEAVY-LADEN, 
UND) TM EL Gl EVO LORE Sh, 
TAKE eM Yavin BWOPON: YOUVE OR 
MY SHOULDER-GEAR. IS EASY 
ANID MYESWAGTS LIGHT. 


My shoulder-gear is easy and my swag is light! 
Robert Lamb died at forty-five, and his last thought 
was for the dust-stained and foot-sore swagman, 
who, tired of humping his swag, and tired of asking 
for work, trudged his cheerless way along the end- 
less roads. 


VI 


My shoulder-gear is easy and my swag ts light. 
If ever there was a man whose load seemed too 
heavy for his back, and whose shoulders seemed 
galled by the straps, it was Robert Lamb. But he 
ridiculed the bare idea. His work was a revelry to 
him. He fell in love with his savages and his swag- 
men; and love makes every burden light. We are 
all fond of the little ragged girl with whom Dr. 
Guthrie remonstrated. She was carrying a boy 
almost as big as herself. ‘Oh,’ she laughed, ‘he’s no 
heavy: he’s my brither!’ His own heart aflame with 
the love of Christ, Robert Lamb really loved his 
wild Hebridean savages and his rough Australian 
swagmen; and, as a natural consequence, love made 
his shoulder-gear wonderfully easy and his swag 
surprisingly light. 


go A Casket of Cameos c 


‘Savages!’ he would say, when people condoled 
with him at having had to labor among such fero- 
cious tribesmen, ‘it’s too bad to call them savages. 
They need knowing, that’s all! And he drew a 
comparison between the men among whom he had 
labored in his missionary days and the mountains 
among which he now lived. “To the eye of a tired 
traveller,’ he said, ‘these mountains are clad with 
nothing but gum-trees, grey, monotonous, sombre. 
But that is Nature’s overall. Live here, and she will 
fill these vast chasms with heaven’s own dyes of 
amethyst and blue, and lead you by mysterious paths 
to caves and waterfalls, to nymph-haunted dells and 
fairy-bowers that fill Australian hearts with pride. 
So is it with the so-called savages, if only you take 
the trouble to know them.’ To such a spirit, the 
yoke is always easy, the burden always light. 


VII 


By means of the tombstone, or, at least, by means 
of the text on the tombstone, Robert Lamb thought 
to defy the tyranny of the tomb and go on with his 
work when death had done its worst. Was the 
strategy successful? Let me close with two stories. 

1. Mrs. Lamb now resides in Scotland. A year 
or two ago she visited Australia, and, one beautiful 
Sunday morning, paid a pilgrimage to her hus- 
band’s grave. On the stone she found a tin of 
water containing some wild flowers, neatly arranged. 
Tied to the flowers was a leaf from a Roman 


Robert Lamb’s Text Or 


Catholic prayer-book. Above the printed prayer 
was written in pencil, “A tribute from a passiny 
swagman; may the Lord have mercy on his soul.’ 
Mrs. Lamb reverently folded the paper and took it 
with her; it is one of her most cherished posses- 
sions: it reminds her that her husband 1s still carry- 
ing on his work. 

2. Near to the tomb of Robert Lamb is the grave 
of a little boy. He was so terribly afflicted, both in 
mind and body, that his poor parents, although feel- 
ing for him that peculiar tenderness which such suf- 
ferers invariably elicit, were thankful when at last 
they could lay his tortured frame to rest in this quiet 
and charming spot. He spent his last summer at 
Wentworth Falls. Dr. Lamb’s tomb acquired an 
extraordinary fascination for him, ‘He would creep 
away to the little god’s-acre,’ his father tells me, 
‘and, very laboriously—for hand and brain had lost 
their cunning—would copy out the inscription from 
the tombstone. We little thought at the time that 
he was soon to have a small grave of his own in that 
bush cemetery.’ 

‘Come unto Me!’ said the Saviour. And the 
studious young New Zealander came. 

‘Take My yoke! said the Saviour. And the 
earnest young graduate took it. 

And he found the straps so easy and the swag so 
light that his only fear was lest the delightful load 
should—in this world or in any other—be lifted 
from his shoulders. 


Vill 
PHILIP MELANCTHON’S TEXT 


I 


Ir still stands, the old house at Wittenberg, in 
which, four centuries ago, Philip Melancthon lived 
and labored. And there, inscribed in bold letters 
above his study door, is Philip Melancthon’s text! 
Melancthon is the most lovable of all the reformers. 
He is gentle, winsome, unassuming and scholarly. 
His friend Camerarius has left us a charming pic- 
ture of Philip’s boyhood. We seem to have actually 
looked into the innocent face and deep-set eyes of 
the young chorister as, to the delight of all the wor- 
shipers, he lifts up his rich clear voice in the choir of 
the village church at Breton, in the beautiful Rhine 
country. In those days his frank simplicity and 
brooding seriousness won the affection of all who 
met him; his alert and enquiring mind was the ad- 
miration of all his instructors; his sensitive spirit 
and clinging nature conquered every heart. In later 
life it was his fate to be overshadowed, and he sub- 
mitted to the process with the ungrudging cheerful- 
ness of a great and generous spirit. He was hidden 
from the public view behind the massive personal- 
ity of Martin Luther; but he was never for a 


Q2 


Philip Melancthon’s Text 93 


moment concealed from Luther’s view. Luther 
knew that Melancthon was all gold, and he never 
attempted to disguise his appreciation of his worth. 
That was a day never to be forgotten when Melanc- 
thon discovered, and showed Luther, that the word 
that had always been translated penance really 
meant repentance, a change of heart. Vhe two men 
were made for each other. ‘I am rough, boisterous 
and stormy,’ writes Luther. ‘I am born to fight 
against innumerable monsters and devils. I must 
remove stumps and stones, cut away thistles and 
thorns, and clear the wild forests. But Master 
Philip comes along gently and softly, sowing and 
watering with joy, according to the gifts which God 
has abundantly bestowed upon him.’ Melancthon, 
in his turn, revelled in Luther’s transcendent im- 
mensity, Melancthon was essentially .a hero-wor- 
shipper, and Luther was his hero. ‘If,’ he writes, 
‘there is any one whom I dearly love, and whom I 
embrace with my whole heart, it is Martin Luther.’ 
In his Life of Melancthon, Professor J. W. Richard 
points out that ‘by his fiery eloquence, his genial 
humor, and his commanding personality, Luther 
commended the Reformation to the people. By his 
moderation, his love of order, and his profound 
scholarship, Melancthon won for it the support of 
the learned. Lovely and pleasant in their lives, they 
toiled, prayed, and suffered for the same great cause, 
and in death they are not divided.’ When Luther 
died, it was Melancthon who pronounced the historic 


04 A Casket of Cameos 


oration over his tomb. And when, a few years later, 
Melancthon followed him, his body was lowered into 
the same grave. They sleep side by side in the old 
Castle Church at Wittenberg, the church on whose 
door Luther nailed his famous theses when he 
sounded, for the first time, the battle-cry of the 
Reformation. 


I] 


High up on the front of this old house at Wit- 
tenberg you may read the inscription: Here lived, 
taught and died Philip Melancthon. For forty years 
this was his home. He loved every stick and stone 
about the place. In the summer time he gathered 
his students about him in the garden, and was always 
sorry when the approach of winter drove them in- 
doors. His study was the front room on the second 
floor. See the inscription! At this place Melanc- 
thon, with his eyes turned towards the north, wrote 
those works which the world now holds in high 
esteem. And this other! Stop, traveller! Against this 
wall stood the couch on which the venerable Philip 
Melancthon piously and peacefully died, April 19, 
1560, at a quarter-past seven o’clock. Yes, against 
this wall stood the couch! It was a little travelling- 
bed that he always took with him on his journeys. 
When he felt himself failing, he expressed a strong 
desire to die in his study, within sight of his books. 
The room seemed haunted by the faces of the 
students who had gathered round him there. ‘Un- 


Philip Melancthon’s Text Qs 


fold my little travelling-bed,’ he said, ‘and stand it 
against the wall. I need it now, for I am going on 
the longest journey of all!’ The nineteenth of April 
was a delicious spring day. The dying man looked 
wistfully towards the open window, and smiled as 
there floated into the quiet room the song of the 
birds he loved so well. Inthe afternoon, Paul Eber, 
his minister, called and read to him his favorite 
passages. Like most of us, Philip Melancthon had 
several Scriptures that were particularly dear to 
him; but one stood out from all the rest. 

‘Read those words again! he exclaimed, inter- 
rupting the minister’s recital of the eighth of 
Romans. 

‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ the 
minister repeated. 

“Ah, that’s it! That’s it!’ murmured Melancthon, 
in a kind of ecstasy. ‘If God be for us, who can be 
against us?’ 

The words had always been an infinite comfort to 
him. In his correspondence, in his lectures, and ia 
his table-talk, you will find them quoted more fre- 
quently than any others. In the darkest hours of 
his life, when powerful foes had threatened to de- 
stroy him, and powerful friends had scowled upon 
and forsaken him, he had solaced himself repeatedly 
with that reflection: “If God be for us, who can be — 
against us?’ When Luther died, and it seemed as 
though the sacred cause for which they had con- 
tended must collapse, he again drew courage from 


06 A Casket of Cameos 


the same inspired source: “Jf God be for us, who 
can be against us?’ The words even wove them- 
selves into the shadowy fabric of his dreams, and 
he frequently awoke repeating them. In the last 
night of his life he fancied that he saw the noble 
words written in letters of flame before his eyes: 
‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ 

And those are the words which, in Latin, you will 
find inscribed over his study door in the old house 
at Wittenberg: Sz: Deus pro nobis, quis contra nos? 
For that is Philip Melancthon’s text! 


Il 


Philip Melancthon died in 1560. Exactly a hun- 
dred years later, in 1660, John Bunyan bends over 
the manuscript of Grace Abounding. ‘I was brought 
into great straits,’ he tells us. For a while he was 
afraid that his health might sink under the strain to 
which he was exposed; he felt that he was threatened 
by a premature death; and he was not ready to die. 
But neither was he ready to live! If he lived, he 
reflected, he might lose such faith as he had. He had 
seen many, whose love for Christ was once white- 
hot, grow cool with the passage of the years. It was 
whilst he was being tossed on the horns of this 
dilemma that the text which, a century earlier, had 
thrilled Melancthon with the exultation of triumph, 
rushed to his rescue. ‘I remember,’ he says, ‘that, 
as I was sitting in a neighbor’s house, and was very > 
sad, that word came suddenly to me: What shall we 


Philip Melancthon’s Text 97 


say to these things? If God be for us, who can be 
against us? That was a help to me.’ Of course 
it was! It was just the word that he needed. 

“What shall I say to Death?’ asked Philip Melanc- 
thon, that day in 1560, when Death came knocking 
at that study door. 

“What shall I say to Life?’ asked John Bunyan, 
that day in 1660, when Life threatened gradually to 
sap away his faith. 

‘What shall we then say to these ihings?’ replies 
Paul. “If God be for us, who can be against us?’ 
It is the only reply possible; and, when that word 
has been clearly spoken, nothing else remains to be 
said. : 


IV 


Exactly a century intervened, as we have seen, 
between the ministry of the text to Philip Melanc- 
‘thon and the ministry of the text to John Bunyan. 
By an interesting coincidence, I find another century 
intervening between two other historic occasions on 
which the text played a conspicuous and memorable 
part. 

Everybody who has read Macaulay’s History of 
England will remember his description of the Battle 
of the Boyne. “The first of July dawned; a day 
which has never since returned without exciting 
strong emotions of very different kinds in the two 
populations which divide Ireland. The sun rose 
bright and cloudless. Soon after four, both armies 


98 A Casket of Cameos 


were in motion.’ But, early as was the hour, Wil- 
liam of Orange did not enter upon the engagements 
of that fateful day until he had assembled his 
troops and read to them the words that he desired 
them to carry in their hearts through all the excite- 
ments and engagements of the day just dawning. 
With the solemnity that becomes men going into 
action, they stood with bared heads before him. 
‘What shall we then say to these things?’ he read. 
And there was a ring of triumph in his voice as he 
continued: ‘Jf God be for us, who can be against 
us?’ When Lord Carson visited Ballymena some 
time ago he was presented by Mr. John Collins with 
a Bible in which that text was specially marked and 
that memory vividly recalled. 

A hundred years after the Battle of the Boyne, 
John Wesley was drawing to the end of his days. 
On his death-bed he thought of William Wilber- 
force and of the gallant but apparently hopeless 
struggle by which that dauntless reformer was en- 
deavoring to overthrow slavery. Mr. Wesley de- 
termined to send him a message of encouragement. 
‘My dear sir,’ he wrote, ‘unless the divine power 
has raised you up to be, like Athanasius, against the 
world, I see not how you can go through with your 
glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable vil- 
Jany which is the scandal of religion, of England, 
and of human nature. Unless God has raised you 
up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the 
opposition of men and devils. But, if God be for us, 


“Philip Melancthon’s Text 99 


who can be against us? Are all of them together 
stronger than He? Go on in the name of God!’ 

The music of Melancthon’s text was always sing- 
ing itself over and over in John Wesley’s heart, 
especially towards the end. It soothed his latest 
moments. ‘A little after,’ so runs the account of 
the closing scene, ‘a little after, a person coming in, 
he strove to speak, but could not. Finding they 
could not understand him, he paused a little, and 
then, with all his remaining strength, cried out: 
“The best of all is, God is with us!’ and, soon after, 
lifting up his dying arm in token of victory, and 
raising his feeble voice with a holy triumph not to 
be expressed, he again repeated the heart-reviving 
words, “The best of all is, God is with us!’ 

God is with us! God is with us! And 1f God be 
for us, who can be against us? 

‘What shall we then say to these things?’ asked 
Philip Melancthon as, in 1560, he looked into the 
face of Death. ‘Jf God be for us, who can be against 
us?’ 

‘What shall we then say to these things?’ asked 
John Bunyan, as, in 1660, he looked into the face of 
Life. ‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ 

‘What shall we then say to these things?’ asked 
William of Orange, as he surveyed the hosts drawn 
up in battle array against him. ‘Jf God be for us, 
who can be against us?’ 

‘What shall we then say to these things?’ asked 
John Wesley, as, a century later, he reviewed the 


itele A Casket of Cameos 


mighty forces that band themselves together to re- 
sist any vital reform. ‘If God be for us, who can be 
against us?’ 

And so, over and over and over again, the text 
that stands inscribed over that old study door at 
Wittenberg has played its part bravely in the making 
of world-history. 


Vv 


Philip Melancthon’s text represents a fascinating 
study of the pros and cons of life—the things that 
are for us and the things that are against us. Paul’s 
conceptions were always continental. They bewilder 
us by their immensity. Analysing the universe, he 
finds in it two groups of forces; and, in each group, 
a‘league or confederacy exists. Reviewing the first 
group, he sees that all things are working; they are 
working in concert; and they are working together 
for good. A sacred conspiracy is afoot. The stars 
above our heads are in secret alliance with the stones 
beneath our feet: the sea is in league with the land; 
the night has an understanding with the day. All 
things are banded, and banded for good. 

But the insurrectionary forces in life are also 
leagued, he says. He mentions them one by one; 
musters them in terrifying array; and shows how 
mighty they are—or. seem. And then, by a magic 
touch, he scornfully reveals their paltriness, their 
pettiness, their essential triviality. Formidable as 
they at first appear, they dwindle into insignificance 


Philip Melancthon’s Text 101 


when compared with the powers that make for 
righteousness. It is the story of Elisha and his 
servant over again. When the young man looked 
upon the cordon of the Syrians lying along the val- 
ley, he cried, ‘My master, my master, what shall we 
do?’ But when, his eyes having been enlightened 
in response to the prophet’s prayer, he saw the 
mountains full of horses and chariots of fire gath- 
ered for his protection, he recognized that the 
powers that were for him were incomparably might- 
ier than the hordes that were assembled against him. 
The secret lies embedded in the heart of Philip 
Melancthon’s text. The quieter forces are in league 
with the divine. The man who ranges himself on 
the side of goodness and of God links his life with 
omnipotence and secures for himself the serene con- 
fidence of ultimate triumph. The sensational fea- 
ture of every illumination is the discovery that the 
~ insurrectionary forces in life are so feeble and the 
nobler forces so overwhelming. Paul draws up his 
fearful array of the powers that threaten to destroy 
us. And then he speaks of the forces pledged to 
our defence. And among those allied forces is— 
GOD! ‘What shall we then say to these things?’ he 
asks. “If God be for us, who can be against us?’ 
The argument is irresistible. 


VI 


And what then? The logic of the situation is 
unmistakable. During a crisis in the American 


102 A Casket of Cameos 


Civil War, a timid soul sought an interview with 
Abraham Lincoln. 

‘Oh, Mr. President,’ he exclaimed, ‘I am most 
anxious that the Lord should be on our side!’ 

‘Well,’ replied Mr. Lincoln, ‘strangely enough, 
that gives me no anxiety at all. The thing I worry 
about is to make sure that J am on the Lord’s side!’ 

That is the question. The divine position is a 
fixture; mine is plastic. Who is on the Lord’s side? 
That man has principalities and powers banded for 
his eternal security. Nothing can harm him in this 
world or in any other. God is for him: who can be 
against him? 


ie 
JOHN BRIGHT’S TEXT 


iy 


THE only geographical discovery that could fittingly 
be named after John Bright would be a range of 
sky-piercing and snow-capped mountains. As you 
contemplate his burly figure—bold, resolute, almost 
defant—and as you gaze upon his leonine head, 
crowned during his later and greater years with 
hair of snowy whiteness, the comparison is simply 
forced upon you. Everything about him is massive, 
majestic, mountainous. In his company—even in 
the company of his biography—you feel that you 
are among the beetling crags, the rugged slopes, the 
scarped peaks, the grand and awful summits. In 
her Records of a Quaker Family, Mrs. Boyce cas- 
ually observes that the physical appearance of John 
Bright stood out in strong and striking contrast 
against that of most of the young Quakers of his 
time. The prevailing type, she says, was tall, thin, 
long-faced and regular-featured. But Bright’s 
robust figure, his strength of chest and limb, his 
honest face and resolute carriage—the head thrown 
defiantly back; the sensitive mouth set as firmly as 
if he were facing a howling mob or standing at the 





103 


TO4 A Casket of Cameos 


bar of a hostile court—reminded you of the stalwart 
leaders of classical times. 


So sturdy Cromwell pushed broad-shouldered on; 
So burly Luther breasted Babylon! 


Moreover, his life is in keeping with his looks. 
The heroic achievements of his illustrious career— 
his gallant fight for the food of the people; his fear- 
less championship of the American slave; his stub- 
born insistence on the enfranchisement of the cot- 
tager; his uncompromising stand for civil and re- 
ligious liberty; his dauntless struggle on behalf of 
European peace—tower up before the fancy of the 
student of his life-story like the virgin summits of 
the Himalayas. His character, as Mr. Gladstone 
feelingly remarked in the House of Commons, his 
character is one which we instinctively regard, not 
merely with admiration, nor even with gratitude, 
but with reverential contemplation. Mr. Gladstone’s 
phrase reminds me of the awe that has often hushed 
my soul into silence as, in New Zealand, I have gazed 
upon the white, white mountains. Bright’s form is 
mountainous; his mind is mountainous. His very 
speech is mountainous. He stands firm-footed and 
square-shouldered before his audience, solid and sta- 
tionary. He never ramps, never raves, never 
screams, never storms. He seldom moves a foot 
or waves a hand. Yet he ‘awes his listeners by the 
very calm of his passion.” His views, as Mr. Trevel- 
yan finely says, are as limpid and resistant as a block 


John Bright’s Text 105 


of crystal. In reading his record, we are exploring 
the ranges all the time. 


Il 


Yes, we are among the mountains; and the moun- 
tains are the home of mystery. The eternal hills 
subdue us by their silence. They seem to nurse a 
secret. So did John Bright. He impressed men by 
his very quietude; his stillness was the eloquent ex- 
pression of his strength; his great soul seemed to 
gather calm and courage from a vision of other 
worlds. Mr. Augustine Birrell always felt that the 
attitude of Mr. Bright’s mind was that of a solitary; 
he seemed to be brooding on thoughts too vast for 
utterance; he literally walked with God. ‘Deep in 
his ‘heart,’ his biographer tells us, ‘there lies always 
something unseen, something reserved and solitary. 
Although he was a popular hero, and a man so 
sociable that he never travelled by train but he drew 
into conversation his chance carriage companions; 
though he was always happy and tender and talk- 
ative when wife or child or friend were near, yet the 
presence of an inner life of deep feeling and medi- 
tation could be felt as the moving power of all that 
he did.’ 

Al secret! 

A something unseen! 

An inner life of deep feeling! 

But the most impressive witness as to all this is 
Lord Morley, then plain John Morley. Everybody 


106 A Casket of Cameos 


knows Lord Morley’s attitude towards religion. But 
Lord Morley, in his Voltaire, tells us that the bril- 
liant Frenchman was more affected by the trans- 
parent sincerity and simple piety of the English 
Quakers than by all the arguments for Christianity 
advanced by the schoolmen. Lord Morley may 
have been speaking feelingly, for he himself con- 
fessed that ‘the most pure and impressive piece of 
religion that he ever witnessed was John Bright 
reading a chapter of the Bible to his maid-servants 
shortly after his wife’s death, in his beautiful and 
feeling voice, followed by a Quaker silence.’ Lord 
Morley ranks John Bright with John Hampden, 
John Selden, John Pym and the great Puritans, 
men who, in Macaulay’s classic phrase, ‘were not 
content to catch occasional glimpses of the Deity 
through an obscuring veil, but aspired to gaze full 
on His intolerable brightness and commune with 
Him face to face.’ ‘It was this,’ says Lord Morley, 
‘that made John Bright the glory of the House of 
Commons.’ He sometimes startled men by unex- 
pectedly drawing the veil and revealing the imma- 
nence of the unseen and eternal. Dr. Dale describes 
one of his great orations. It was delivered in the 
Birmingham Town Hall. The chairs had been re- 
moved so that as many as possible could be crowded 
into the building. Five thousand men stood on the 
floor, packed so tightly that they could not raise 
their hands from their sides to applaud. Mr. Bright 
had recently been ill; and he began by reverently 


) 


John Bright’s Text 107 


expressing his gratitude to God for his recovery. 
Dr. Dale says that the hush that fell on the vast 
and excited assembly as soon as he began to speak 
deepened into awe. ‘We had expected a fierce 
assault on his political opponents; but the storms of 
party passion were for a moment stilled; we sud- 
denly found ourselves in the presence of the eternal, 
and some of us, perhaps, rebuked ourselves in the 
words of the patriarch, “Surely the Lord 1s in this 
place and I knew it not!’ 

Here, then, is the man—a mountainous man—a 
man who, like the mountains, lifts his head to the 
skies and cherishes in solitude a wondrous secret. 
Now what is that secret? And how and when did 
he learn it? And what if the secret prove to be a 
text? 


ipa 


John Bright’s text was as mountainous as the man 
himself, as mountainous as everything about him. 
For John Bright’s text was the Sermon on the 
Mount. And the Sermon on the Mount was not 
only delivered on a Mount; it is a Mount. It isa 
lofty eminence standing out boldly against the sky- 
line of all our little earthly horizons; it is a range 
of sunlit heights whose terrific grandeur has taunted 
and challenged and beckoned the pilgrims of the 
ages. And if, as they essayed the superb adventure, 
they sometimes scaled the slopes with aching 
sinews and with bleeding feet, they nevertheless 


108 A Casket of Cameos 


struggled bravely upwards with eager hearts and 
radiant faces. 

The public life of John Bright was, as he himself 
put it, one long endeavor to inscribe the Sermon on 
the Mount on the pages of the Statute Book. No 
man of his time could quote Scripture as John 
Bright could quote it. When it was whispered 
through the lobbies of the House of Commons that 
‘Bright was up,’ the chamber instantly filled. Lord 
Morley considers him the stateliest and most finished 
orator to whom the House of Commons has ever 
listened: ‘I have met men,’ he says, ‘who have heard 
Pitt and Fox, and in whose judgment their eloquence 
at its best was inferior to the finest efforts of John 
Bright.’ And, by universal consent, the most im- 
pressive passages in those masterpieces of English 
rhetoric were his appeals to the majesty and author- 
ity of Scripture. In his deep voice and with his 
simple dignity, he would cite some noble phrase 
from prophet or psalmist or seer; and his hearers 
would somehow feel that he had lifted the question 
beyond the range of argument. A gentleman who 
heard him speak at Bradford in 1877 wrote to a 
London paper in 1909 to say that he could never 
forget how Mr. Bright’s voice swelled and grew in 
depth and volume, as it was wont to do when he 
was deeply moved, as he referred to the Sermon on 
the Mount. Mr. Bright repeated, as only he could 
have done, the blessings uttered by the divine lips 
upon the Poor in Spirit, the Mourners, the Meek, 


John Bright’s Text ‘BG 


the Hungerers after Righteousness, the Merciful, 
the Pure in Heart and the Peacemakers; and then, 
having impressively recited these Beatitudes and 
quoted other appropriate expressions from the Ser- 
mon on the Mount, he summed up his aim, and that 
of his associates, by saying, ‘We have tried to put 
Holy Writ into an Act of Parliament! 

His friendship with Cobden—one of the most 
potent factors in his career—culminated in an inci- 
dent in which the Sermon on the Mount figures 
conspicuously. It was Cobden who gave Bright his 
mission. ‘The story is very familiar: it is one of 
the most tender idylls in the public life of England. 
Bright’s beautiful young wife, to whom he was de- 
votedly attached, had been suddenly snatched from 
him. Bright was inconsolable. Let him tell his own 
story. ‘It was in 1841,’ he says. ‘The sufferings 
throughout the country were fearful. I was at 
Leamington, and, on the day when Cobden called 
upon me—for he happened to be there at the time 
on a visit to some relatives—I was in the depths of 
grief, | might almost say despair; for the light and 
sunshine of my house had been extinguished. All 
that was left on earth of my young wife, except the 
memory of a sainted life and a too brief happiness, 
was lying still and cold in the chamber above us. 
Mr. Cobden called upon me, and addressed me, as 
you might suppose, with words of condolence. After 
a time he looked up and said, “There are thousands 
of houses in England at this moment where wives, 


IIo A Casket of Cameos 


mothers and children are dying of hunger. Now,” 
he said, “when the first paroxysm of your grief is 
past, I would advise you to come with me, and we 
will never rest till the Corn Law is repealed.” I 
accepted his invitation. I knew that the description 
he had given of the homes of thousands was not an 
exaggerated description. I felt in my conscience 
that this was a work which somebody must do, and 
therefore I accepted his invitation, and from that 
time we never ceased to labor hard in fulfilment of 
the resolution which we had made.’ During the 
seven years that followed, the reformers endured 
every form of ignominy, ridicule and persecution, 
but they struggled on until their cause was trium- 
phant and the whole world was ringing with their 
fame. 

A few years later, Bright is again overwhelmed 
with grief. Cobden himself is dead. John Bright 
is in the darkened home. “This morning,’ he says, 
‘I spent a long time, probably near two hours, in the 
library where the body is, with the children. Stand- 
ing by me, and leaning on the coffin, was his sorrow- 
ing daughter, one whose attachment to her father 
seems to have been a passion scarcely equalled 
amongst daughters. She said, “My father used to 
like me very much to read to him the Sermon on the 
Mount; he said it was so very beautiful.” His own 
life was to a large extent a sermon based upon that 
text, the greatest of all sermons; his life was a life 
of perpetual self-sacrifice.’ I have sometimes won- 


John Bright’s Text IIE 


dered whether Cobden’s fondness for the Sermon on 
the Mount was the result of his intimacy with 
Bright. At any rate, the terms in which Mr. Bright 
records the incident sufficiently reflect the reverent 
affection that he always cherished for that monu- 
mental fragment of sacred literature. 


IV 

There is an old legend of a boy who gazed so fre- 
quently and so steadfastly at the portrait of a face 
that he admired, that, little by little, his own features 
came to resemble those in the painting. Something 
of the kind happened in the case of John Bright. 
He not only loved the Sermon on the Mount: he 
became the Sermon on the Mount. “The Sermon 
on the Mount, says a well-known commentator, 
‘stands between the Old Testament and the New; 
and it gathers to itself all that is best in both.’ 
Strangely enough, John Bright’s biographer makes 
a very similar remark in reference to him. ‘In him 
were blended,’ says Mr. Trevelyan, ‘the Old Testa- 
ment and the New, the two indispensable contradic- 
tories that man must learn to reconcile within his 
breast. By careful search, some rudiments of these 
two opposites can be found in each of us, but in 
none did they come to such double perfection as in 
John Bright.” Men who loved the Sermon on the 
Mount delighted in his company; men who would 
have been rebuked by its perusal were rebuked by 
his silent presence. The Life of John Bright is the 


II2 A Casket of Cameos 


finest commentary on the Sermon on the Mount that 
has ever been published. One of these days some 
commanding literary genius will give us a volume 
containing the Sermon on the Mount, sentence by 
sentence, and, against each sentence, he will repro- 
duce some speedily illuminative extract from the 
speeches or biography of John Bright. This is how 
he will go about it: 

Blessed are the Poor in Spirit, says the first clause 
of the Sermon on the Mount. And, against it, our 
littérateur will give the passage telling of Mr. 
Bright’s ceaseless ministry to the cripple woman 
among the Welsh hills. Or, if he prefers an extract 
from one of his hero’s election speeches, he will give 
us this passage delivered at Durham. ‘Rich and 
great people can take care of themselves,’ said Mr. 
Bright, “but the poor and defenceless—the men 
with small cottages and large families—the men 
who must work six full days every week if they are 
to live in anything like comfort for a week—these 
men want defenders; they want champions to state 
their case in Parliament; they want men who will 
protest against any infringement of their rights.’ 

Blessed are the Merciful, says the Sermon on the 
Mount. When Sir Henry Hawkins was made a 
judge—and he became the greatest criminal judge 
that our courts have ever known—he met John 
Bright at dinner. Sir Henry told Mr. Bright of 
his elevation, and expected his congratulations. 
‘But,’ says Sir Henry, ‘he simply put his hand on 


John Bright’s Text 113 


my shoulder, and, in a voice of deep emotion, said, 
“Be merciful, Hawkins, be merciful!’’ And any- 
body who cares to look up a certain issue of Punch, 
published in February, 1887, will find a particularly 
beautiful poem in celebration of the skill with which 
Sir Henry mingled mercy with justice. 

Blessed are the Peacemakers, says the Sermon on 
the Mount. When, in 1855, the nation was swept 
off its feet by the fever of war, Bright brought upon 
himself the furious indignation of the whole com- 
munity by his passionate pleadings for peace. ‘The 
Angel of Death is abroad throughout the land,’ he 
exclaimed in the House of Commons, and, amidst a 
tense and strained silence, in the course of which 
he glanced at the vacant seats of members who had 
fallen, he added, ‘you may almost hear the beating 
of his wings!’ ‘After the speech,’ Bright told a 
friend, ‘I went into Bellamy’s to have a chop. Dis- 
raeli came and sat down beside me. “Bright,” he 
said, “I would give all that I ever had to have made 
the speech that you made just now!”’ 

Blessed are the Pure in Heart, says the Sermon 
on the Mount. John Bright loved all pure and beat- 
tiful things. ‘He never tired of the sight of moun- 
tain and stream,’ says Mr. Trevelyan, ‘or of the 
sound of Milton and the Bible passages.’ The last 
photograph ever taken of him represents him with 
his arm round his little granddaughter; and the last 
half-conscious caress of his dying hand rested on 
the head of his little dog ‘Fly.’ 


114 A Casket of Cameos 


And so one might go on to the end. For the 
Sermon on the Mount ends with the Parable of the 
Two Builders, one of whom reared his house on the 
rock and the other on the sand. If ever there was 
a man who founded all of his hope for time and for 
eternity upon the Rock—the Rock of Ages—it was 
John Bright. And when the storms came—and few 
_ men have felt their fury more than he—he was able 
to face them with a serenity that was unclouded and 
unruffled. 


V 


This was his secret. When did he learn it? It 
is difficult to say. It is always difficult to point to 
any precise spot among the foothills and to say, 
Here the plain comes to an end and here the moun- 
tains begin! But those who have caught the spirit 
of that Quaker home at Rochdale—the home of 
John Bright’s infancy—will understand. When Dr. 
Oswald Dykes wrote his commentary on the Sermon 
on the Mount he entitled it The Mamifesto of the 
King. It is a noble title. From his earliest child- 
hood John Bright was taught the absolute supremacy 
of Jesus. He crowned Christ Lord of all, and 
accepted the Sermon on the Mount as his Master’s 
royal mandate. Tennyson, his son tells us, had a 
boundless admiration for the Sermon on the Mount: 
he thought it perfect beyond compare; but he recog- 
nized that it involves a man in tremendous obliga- 
tions. 


John Bright’s Text. 11S 


Man am I grown, a man’s work must I dao. 
Follow the deer? follow the Christ, the King, 

Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King— 
Else, wherefore born? 


That was John Bright’s sentiment exactly; in that 
spirit he lived, in that spirit he labored, and in that 


spirit he died. 


m4 
JOEY McQUMPHA’S TEXT 


I 


Jory McQuMPHA was only a little child—a wee 
Scots laddie—but he had a text; and it was the 
darling dream of his brief day to be a minister and 
go into the pulpit and preach on that text. It is 
Sir J. M. Barrie who, in A Window in Thrums, 
tells Joey’s story. At least, Sir J. M. Barrie tells 
the story of Joey’s mother, poor Jess; and it is Jess 
who tells us all about Joey. The window that gives 
its name to Sir J. M. Barrie’s book is simply the 
frame in which, to those who pass down the brae, 
the face of Jess is always set. For Jess is an in- 
valid. With a little help she can just hobble across 
from the bed to the window; and it is at this window 
that Jess has sat, day after day, for more than 
twenty years. 

Once, long ago, Jess was taken ill, and the doctor 
abandoned hope. She called Joey to her bedside and 
told him that she was going on a long, long journey, 
and she begged ‘him to be ‘a terrible guid laddie’ to 
his father and to Leeby, his sister, after she had 
gone. Her words, however, failed to produce the 
effect that she desired. Joey was simply puzzled, be- 
wildered, dumbfounded. His mother, who could 

116 


Joey McQumpha’s Text L17 


scarcely crawl across the room, and who could not 
even move without her stick, going on a long, long 
journey! The thing was ridiculous; and, anyhow, 
he could circumvent any such attempt! He lay 
awake that night until the house was quiet. And 
then he rose in the darkness, stole out into the 
garden, and there, with his little frame shivering and 
his teeth chattering, he buried his mother’s staff 
among the cabbages! How could she go on a long, 
long journey without it? Happily for Joey, and 
for his father and sister, Jess did not set out on that 
long journey after all. It was Joey himself who 
took it. 

“Twenty years have passed,’ Sir James tells us, 
‘since Joey ran down the brae to play. Jess shook 
her staff fondly at him. A cart rumbled by, the 
driver nodding on the shaft. It rounded the corner 
and stopped suddenly, and then a woman screamed. 
A handful of men carried Joey’s dead body to his 
mother, and that was the tragedy of Jess’s life.’ 

And yet there was a sense in which Joey never 
went out of Jess’s life. ‘Every other living being 
forgot him; even to Hendry he became scarcely a 
name; but there were times when Jess’s face quiv- 
ered and her old arms went out for her dead boy.’ 
On Sundays especially he seemed to creep softly 
back to her. Jess, of course, could not go to church. 
But when the others had gone, and the house was 
still, she and Joey seemed shut up to each other. 
On those hushed and hallowed mornings, she was 


118 A Casket of Cameos 


very close to the little boy who died. She liked 
to remember that many a time, after church, he had 
run all the way home in order to get to her as quickly 
as possible, and had stood beside her chair waving 
his hands in a reverent way just like the minister. 
Jamie, her other boy, had always prattled about 
keeping a shop; but Joey never once wavered in his 
resolve to be a minister. He would be a minister, 
he used to say, and his first text would be Thou 
God seest me. 

‘We'll get a carriage to ye, mother,’ he would tell 
her, “so ’at ye can come and hear me preach on 
Thou God seest me. It doesna do, mother, for the 
minister in the pulpit to nod to ony o’ the folk; but 
Pll gie ye a look an’ ye'll ken it’s me. Ye'll be 
proud o’ me, will ye no, mother, when ye see me 
comin’ sailin’ alang to the pulpit in my gown? The 
other folk will be sittin’ in their seats wonderin’ 
what my text’s to be; but you'll ken, mother, an’ 
you'll turn up to Thou God seest me afore I gie out 
the chapter.’ 

“Ye'll wonder at me,’ Jess would say, twenty years 
afterwards, “but I’ve sat here in the lang fore-nichts 
dreamin’ ’at Joey was a grown man noo, an’ ’at I 
was puttin’ on my bonnet to come to the kirk to hear 
him preach on Thou God seest me. I used to be 
proud to hear him speakin’ o’ it. Aye, but that day 
he was coffined, for all the minister prayed, I found 
it hard to say, Thou God. seest me. It’s the text I 
like best noo, though, an’ when Hendry an’ Leeby 


Joey McQumpha’s Text 119 


is at the kirk I turn’t up often, often in the Bible. 
I read frae the beginnin’ o’ the chapter, but when 
I come to Thou God seest me I stop. Na, it’s no’at 
there’s ony rebellion to the Lord in my heart noo, 
for I ken He was lookin’ doon when the cart gaed 
ower Joey, an’ He wanted to tak my laddie to Him- 
self. But juist when I come to Thou God seest me, 
I let the Book lie in my lap, for aince a body’s sure 
o’ that they’re sure o’ all.’ 

Towards the end of the book, Sir J. M. Barrie 
tells us how, at length, poor Jess did actually set 
out on that long, long journey from which, many 
years before, Joey had tried so hard to turn her. 
But this time there was no Joey to hide her stick; 
and, even if the hiding of the stick could have 
rendered the journey impossible, Joey would not 
have hidden it; for, this time, the long, long jour- 
ney was not taking her from him but bringing her 
to him. Jess outlived her husband and daughter, 
after all; but her turn came at last. The minister 
was with her when she died. She was in her chair 
at the window, and the minister asked her, as was 
his custom, if there was any particular chapter which 
she would like him to read. Since her husband’s 
death she had always asked for the fourteenth of 
John. It was known in Thrums as Hendry’s favor- 
ite chapter; he had always sought and found refuge 
there in days of stress and storm. But this time 
she asked the minister to read the sixteenth of 
Genesis. It was ever her own favorite. 


120 A Casket of Cameos 


‘Aye, ye'll laugh,’ she would sometimes say, ‘but 
I think that, though Joey never lived to preach in 
a kirk, he’s often preached frae Thou God seest me 
to me. I dinna ken ’at I would ever hae been sae 
sure o’ that if it hadna been for him, an’ so I think I 
see him sailin’ doon to the pulpit juist as he said he 
would do. Naebody sees him but me, but I see him 
gien me the look he spoke o’.’ 

She asked the minister to read that chapter at the 
last. ‘When I came to the thirteenth verse,’ the 
minister afterwards said, ‘and when I read the 
words Thou God seest me, she covered her face with 
her two hands and said, “Joey’s text! Joey’s text! 
Oh, but I grudged ye sair, Joey!” I shut the book 
when I came to the end of the chapter and then I 
saw that she was dead.’ 

Joey's text! Joeys text! Perhaps Sw J. M. 
Barnie’s text! 

Thou God seest me! Thou God seest me! 

‘When I come to “Thou God seest me’,’ says Jess, 
‘I let the Book he in my lap, for aince a body’s sure 
0° that, theyre sure o° all! 

I wonder what she meant! We must try to find 
out! 


II 


And, to help us in the elucidation of that problem, 
I propose to call a pair of witnesses, each of them as 
unlike the other as could possibly be. 

The first is a Lord Mayor of London. 


Joey McQumpha’s Text 121 


The second is the Mother Superior of a Spanish 
Convent! 

The Lord Mayor of London to whom I refer is 
Sir William M’Arthur, K.C.M.G., one of England’s 
merchant princes. The name of Sir William 
M’Arthur is associated, not only with the commer- 
cial activities of the huge metropolis whose chief 
magistrate he became, and one of whose constituen- 
cies he represented in the House of Commons, but 
with the commercial activities of this great Austral- 
ian city in which I am writing. As early as 1856 
he was the head of one of our principal mercantile 
houses; and few visitors from the Homeland have 
been shown more signal honor than was he when, 
in 1878, he visited these shores. Parliaments, cor- 
porations and commercial organizations vied with 
each other in welcoming him to Australia. He be- 
came Lord Mayor of London in 1880; and, to cele- 
brate the event, banquets were held simultaneously 
on both sides of the world. His biography, written 
by Mr. Thomas McCullagh, lies open on my desk 
at this moment. As I review Sir William M’Ar- 
thur’s crowded and useful life; as I survey the 
world-wide ramifications of his stupendous com- 
mercial enterprises; as [ recount the exalted public 
positions that, one after the other, he adorned; as 
I note his munificent benefactions, his ample philan- 
thropies and his immense influence; above all, when 
I contemplate his beautiful home life and his simple 
piety, I find myself in a fever of curiosity to ascer- 


122 A Casket of Cameos 


tain the secret of so wealthy and fruitful a career. 
By what subtle forces was it inaugurated? Mr. 
McCuliagh confesses his inability to give any pre- 
cise account of the dawn of faith in his hero’s soul. 
‘To the close of his life,’ Mr. McCullagh says, ‘Sir 
William could not recollect a time when he did not, 
through divine grace, love God and trust in Christ 
as his personal Saviour.’ And, just before his death, 
he told the Rev. C. H. Crookshank that he could 
point to no particular instrumentality, or mark any 
particular time, as the instrumentality and time of 
his conversion. ‘From earliest years,’ says Mr. 
Crookshank, ‘he appears, like Timothy, to have 
known the Scriptures, and to have been surrounded 
by gracious influences through which he grew up 
in the fear of the Lord.’ So far, except in a vague 
and general way, my quest for the secret of his 
noble life seems fruitless. 

Later on, however, I make an illuminating dis- 
covery. Sir William died very suddenly in a rail- 
way train, on his way to business, at the age of 
seventy-eight. In his desk, after his death, was 
found a document which he had drawn up as a 
youth of twenty, and which he had jealously pre- 
served all through the years. It begins by expressing 
his anxiety lest the business life on which he is just 
embarking should so excite and engross his atten- 
tion as to wean his heart away from God. He then 
lays down the rules by which his life shall be gov- 
erned. And the document ends with a prayer: 


Joey McQumpha’s Text 123 


‘O Lord God Almighty, he cries, ‘do Thou enable me 
to put these resolutions into practice. Grant me the 
aid of Thy Holy Spirit! Forgive the past and enable 
me to live to Thee in future, and in all things to pro- 
mote Thy honor and glory, through Jesus Christ my 
Lord. Amen.’ And, conspicuously among the rules 
that he frames for the guidance of his life, I find 
this: 

‘I will endeavor to keep a calm recollection of 
spirit when engaged in purchasing goods, remem- 
bering at all times Thou God seest me.’ 

That significant document is dated Manchester, 
November 9, 1830. Exactly fifty years afterwards 
to the very day—on November 9, 1880—Sir Wil- 
liam M’Arthur became Lord Mayor of London! 


Ill 


It is a far cry from this brilliant banquet at the 
Guildhall to the hushed seclusion of Santa Teresa’s 
cloister. But the text—the text on which Joey 
McOQumpha was so eager to preach; the text that 
so strangely comforted poor Jess in the years that 
followed Joey’s death; the text on which Sir William 
M’Arthur founded his illustrious career—that same 
text once came with extraordinary grace and power 
to the anxious and almost despairing Teresa. Al- 
though a nun, she had long since given up praying. 
The frightful aridity of her heart filled her with 
dread, and she felt that she dared not present her- 
self before the heavenly throne. But Thou God seest 


124 A Casket of Cameos 


me! She was in the presence of the Highest, 
whether she deliberately sought that presence or 
not! ‘It was a great act of grace in God to give me 
that vision!’ she says. ‘I believe that, had the Lord 
been pleased to send me that great revelation of 
Himself earlier in my life, it would have kept me 
back from much sin. I knew not where to hide 
myself. I could not flee from that presence. Oh, 
that those who commit deeds of darkness could see 
what I saw! If they could but see that there is no 
place secret from God; but that all that they do 
is done before Him and in Him! Oh the madness 
of committing sin in the immediate presence of a 
Majesty so great! In this also I saw His infinite 
mercy in that He suffers such a sinner as I am still 
to live!’ 

So much for our pair of witnesses! The striking 
and valuable factor in their testimony lies in the fact 
that, like Joey McQumpha and his mother, the Lord 
Mayor and the Mother Superior both discover 
something wonderfully winsome in the text. If only 
Joey could have lived and become a minister! If 
only he could have preached the sermon that he so 
fervently desired to preach! And if only his mother 
and Sir William M’Arthur and Santa Teresa could 
have been in the kirk that morning! How delighted 
all three of them would have been when the young 
minister announced his text! 

Thou God seest me! I can see old Jess’s eyes 
sparkle. “Aye,’ she murmurs to herself in a kind 


Joey McQumpha’s Text 125 


of ecstasy, “aince a body’s sure o’ that, they’re sure 
o’ all! | 

Thou God seest me! Sir William M’Arthur gives 
a start as, looking into the preacher’s glowing face, 
the old familiar words fall once more upon his ear. 
He thinks of that mellow document that he himself 
drafted as a boy. ‘I will endeavor to keep a calm 
recollection of spirit when engaged in purchasing 
goods, remembering at all times Thou God seest 
me! 

Thou God seest me! A tear glistens on Santa 
Teresa’s cheek as she recalls the vision that helped 
her back to a life of communion with her Lord! 

Thou God seest me! Jess finds in Joey’s text an 
unspeakable comfort. The Lord Mayor finds in 
Joey’s text a life-long inspiration. Santa Teresa 
finds in Joey’s text an infinite mercy. ‘In this I saw 
his infinite mercy in that He suffers me still to 
live.’ 

Unspeakable Comfort! Life-long Inspiration! In- 
finte Mercy! Is it any wonder that Joey McQumpha 
longed to be a minister and to preach on that great 
texte 


IV 


‘I used to hate that text!’ Bishop Bonner would 
say, as he pointed to the words that were so dear to 
Joey and Jess. “When I was a child and was 
naughty, my nurse made me repeat it again and 
again,’ the Bishop said, ‘and it terrified me! But, 


126 A Casket of Cameos 


later on, his eyes were opened. He saw in the text 
all that Joey and Jess and Sir William M’ Arthur and 
Santa Teresa saw in it, and he became as fond of 
itas they were. The point is, not that | am watched, 
but that I am watched by One whose name is Love 
and whose heart is full of compassion. There are 
some lines by Dr. J. R. Miller which, in the course 
of his sermon, Joey would not, perhaps, have 
quoted; but I know that he would have liked to 
quote them: 


But naebody ever will ken, lassie, 
O naebody ever will ken, 
How much we hide that we canna ’bide 
Should be seen by the eyes o’ men, lassie, 
Should be seen by the eyes o’ men. 


There’s One sees thro’ an’ thro’, lassie, 
There’s One sees thro’ an’ thro’: 

And better than a’, whatever befa’, 

He’s gentle, an’ kind, an’ true, lassie, 
He’s gentle an’ kind an’ true. 


That’s it! Thou God seest me; and Thou art 
gentle an’ kind an’ true! 
Mr. Frederick Mann expresses the same thought: 


Thou seest me, O God, and plain beneath Thy sight appear 
The tale of years that vanish, and all secrets deep as night; 
Thine eyes are searching through me, yet I will not 
shrink nor fear: 
Thy heart is full of tenderness, Thine arm of help is near, 
And Thou, O God, art Love as well as Light! 


Joey McQumpha’s Text 127 


Thou seest me. Each word and inmost thought alike is 
known, 

My comings and my goings, though Thyself I cannot see; 

Though blindness well might smite me from the light 
before Thy Throne, 

My soul bows down to bless Thee for Thou callest me 
Thine own, 

And seeing, yet Thou lovest even me! 


The Rev. Joseph McQumpha would have pointed 
out, in that sermon that he did not live to preach, 
that the eyes that search me through and through 
are the eyes that, turning and looking upon Peter, 
broke his heart. And, beyond the shadow of a 
doubt, there would have been many broken hearts 
and contrite spirits in the Rev. Joseph McQumpha’s 
church that morning. 


XI 
EGE MTOR S AT HOE 


I 


I cAN see him now, as, stately and patriarchal, he 
walked up the desk-room of the old college to ad- 
dress us, As that impressive and striking figure 
appeared at the door, every student instinctively 
sprang to his feet and remained standing till the 
Grand Old Man was seated. I thought that I had 
never seen a face more beautiful, a figure more 
picturesque. A visitant from another world could 
scarcely have proved more arresting or awe-inspir- 
ing. When it was announced that Dr. J. G. Paton, 
the veteran missionary to the New Hebrides, was 
coming to address the college, I expected to hear 
something thrilling and affecting; but, somehow, it 
did not occur to me that my eyes would be captivated 
as well. But, when the hero of my dreams appeared, 
a picture which I shall carry with me to my dying 
day was added to the gallery which my memory 
treasures. This was in London many years ago. I 
little thought that afternoon that the apostolic form 
before me would one day sleep in an Australian 
grave, and that my own home would stand within 
half an hour’s journey of his lovely resting-place. 


128 


J. G. Paton’s Text 129 


In preparation for the task to which I now address 
myself, I paid a pilgrimage to the Boroondara Ceme- 
tery this afternoon, and read Dr. J. G. Paton’s text 
bravely inscribed upon his tomb. It is not the kind 
of text that is usually engraved upon such monu- 
ments, but it is in every way appropriate to him. 
‘In his private conversation,’ writes his son, the Rev. 
F, H. L. Paton, M.A., B.D., ‘in his private conversa- 
tion and in his public addresses, my father was con- 
stantly quoting the words, Lo, I am with you alway, 
as the inspiration of his quietness and confidence in 
time of danger, and of his hope in the face of human 
impossibilities. So much was this realized by his 
family that we decided to inscribe that text upon 
his tomb in the Boroondara Cemetery. It seemed 
to all of us to sum up the essential element in his 
faith, and the supreme source of his courage and 
endurance.’ 

‘Lo, 1 am with you alway! 

The secret of a quiet heart! 

The secret of a@ gallant spirit! 

The secret of a sunny faith! 

The text so often on the tongue! The text upon 
the tomb! 

‘Lo, I am with you alway, even unio the end!’ 


I] 


The text is the tincture of miracle. Edna Lyall 
once wrote a novel—lWV’e Two—to show the won- 
drous magic that slumbers in those sacred syllables. 


i a A Casket of Cameos 


We Two is the story of Erica Raeburn. Erica is the 
daughter of Luke Raeburn, the sceptic; and she has 
been taught from infancy to despise all holy things. 
But as life, with its stress and struggle, goes on, she 
finds that she cannot satisfy her soul with denials 
and negations. “At last,’ Edna Lyall says, ‘Erica’s 
hopelessness, her sheer desperation, drove her to cry 
to the Possibly Existent.’ She stood at the open 
window of her little room, looking out into the 
summer night. Before she knew what had hap- 
pened, she was praying! 

‘O God,’ she cried, ‘I have no reason to think that 
Thou art, except that there is such fearful need of 
Thee. I can see no single proof in all the world that 
Thou art here. But 7f Thou art, O Father, if Thou 
art, help me to know Thee! Show me what is true!’ 

A few days later the answer came. Erica was at 
the British Museum, making some extracts, in the 
ordinary course of her business, from the Life of 
Livingstone. All at once she came upon the extract 
from Livingstone’s Journal, in which he speaks of 
his absolute reliance upon the text, Lo, J am with 
you alway. ‘It is the word,’ says Livingstone, ‘it is 
the word of a gentleman of the strictest and most 
sacred honor, and there’s an end of it!’ The words 
profoundly affected Erica. Lo, J am with you al- 
way! They represented, not a Moral Principle, nor 
a Logical Proposition, but a Living Presence! 

‘Exactly how it came to her, Erica never knew, 
nor could she put in words the story of the next 


J. G. Paton’s Text 13 


few minutes. When God’s great sunrise finds us 
out, we have need of something higher than human 
speech ; there ave no words for it. Allin a moment, 
the Christ Who had been to her merely a noble 
character of ancient history became to her the most 
real and vital of all living realities. It was like com- 
ing into a new world ;even dingy Bloomsbury seemed 
beautiful. Her face was so bright, so like the face 
of a happy child, that more than one passer-by was 
startled by it, lifted for a moment from sordid cares 
into a purer atmosphere.’ 

All this is in the early part of the book; but even 
in the last chapter Erica is still rejoicing in her text, 
and in the deathless treasure which it had so sud- 
denly unfolded to her. God’s great sunrise had 
come to stay. 


Itt 


God’s great sunrise broke upon J. G. Paton amidst 
the sanctities and simplicities of his Scottish home. 
He was only a boy when he learned the sublime 
secret to which the text gives expression, and it was 
his father who revealed it to him. In a passage that 
has taken its place among our spiritual classics, he 
has described the little Dumfriesshire cottage, with 
its ‘but’ and its ‘ben,’ and the tiny apartment in 
which he used to hear his father at prayer. And 
whenever the good man issued from that cottage 
sanctuary, there was a light in his face which, Dr. 
Paton says, the outside world could never under- 


132 A Casket of Cameos 


stand; ‘but we children knew that it was a reflection 
of the Divine Presence in which his life was lived’ 

And, continuing this touching story, Dr. Paton 
describes the impression that his father’s prayers in 
that little room made upon his boyish mind. ‘Never,’ 
he says, ‘in temple or cathedral, on mountain or in 
glen, can I hope to feel that the Lord God is more 
near, more visibly walking and talking with men, 
than under that humble cottage roof of thatch and 
oaken wattles. Though everything else in religion 
were by some unthinkable catastrophe to be swept 
out of memory, my soul would wander back to those 
early scenes, and would shut itself up once again 
in that sanctuary closet, and, hearing still the echoes 
of those cries to God, would hurl back all doubt with 
the victorious appeal: He walked with God; why 
may not I?’ 

Why, indeed? J. G. Paton resolved that his 
father’s religion should be /is religion; his father’s 
God his God. He pinned his faith to the sublime 
assurance on which his father rested with such se- 
renity. During all his adventurous years in the 
South Seas, he relied implicitly upon it, and, as a 
result, he says that he felt immortal till his work 
was done. ‘Trials and hairbreadth escapes only 
strengthened my faith and nerved me for more to 
follow; and they trod swiftly enough upon each 
other’s heels. Without that abiding consciousness 
of the presence and power of my Lord and Saviour, 
nothing in the world could have preserved me from 


a 


J. G. Paton’s Text 133 


losing my reason and perishing miserably. His 
words Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end 
became to me so real that it would not have startled 
me to behold Him, as Stephen did, gazing down 
upon the scene. It is the sober truth that I had 
my nearest and most intimate glimpses of the pres- 
ence of my Lord in those dread moments when 
musket, club or spear was being levelled at my life.’ 

Thus, then, J. G. Paton, as a boy in his Scottish 
home, learned the unutterable value of the text. Lo, 
Lam with you alway. ‘Thus, too, twenty years later, 
he went out to his life-work, singing in his soul 
those golden words. 


IV 


He very quickly tested their efficacy and power. 
It was on the fifth of November, 1858, that the 
young Scotsman and his wife first landed on Tanna. 
It was purely a cannibal island in those days, and the 
white man found his faith in his text severely tried. 
‘My first impressions,’ he tells us, “drove me to the 
verge of utter dismay. On beholding the natives 
in their paint and nakedness and misery, my heart 
was as full of horror as of pity. Had I given up my 
much-beloved work, and my dear people in Glasgow, 
with so many delightful associations, to consecrate 
my life to these degraded creatures? Was it pos- 
sible to teach them right and wrong, to Christianize, 
or even to civilize them?’ But this, he goes on to 
say, was only a passing feeling. He soon reminded 


134 A Casket of Cameos 


himself that he and his wife were not undertaking 
the work at their own charges. They were not 
alone. The transformation of the natives seemed 
impossible; but his son has already told us that the 
text often braced him to face the apparently impos- 
sible. It did then. 

If ever a man seemed lonely, J. G. Paton seemed 
lonely when, three months later, he had to dig with 
his own hands a grave for his young wife and his 
baby boy. In spite of all pleas and remonstrances, 
Mrs. Paton had insisted on accompanying him, and 
now, the only white man on the island, he was com- 
pelled to lay her to rest on this savage spot. ‘Let 
those,’ he says, “who have ever passed through simi- 
lar darkness—darkness as of midnight—feel for 
me; as for all others, it would be more than vain to 
try to paint my sorrows. I was stunned: my reason 
seemed almost to give way: I built a wall of coral 
round the grave, and covered the top with beautiful 
white coral, broken small as gravel; and that spot 
became my sacred and much-frequented shrine dur- 
ing all the years that, amidst difficulties, dangers and 
deaths, I labored for the salvation of these savage 
islanders. Whenever Tanna turns to the Lord and 
is won for Christ, men will find the memory of that 
spot still green. It was there that I claimed for God 
the land in which I had buried my dead with faith 
and hope.’ 

With faith and hope! What faith? What hope? 
It was the faith and the hope of his text! Lo, I am 


J. G. Paton’s Text 135 


with you alway! ‘I was never altogether forsaken,’ 
he says, in his story of that dreadful time. “The 
ever-merciful Lord sustained me to lay the precious 
dust of my loved ones in the same quiet grave. But 
for Jesus, and the fellowship He vouchsafed me 
there, I must have gone mad and died beside that 
lonely grave! A few weeks afterwards, George 
Augustus Selwyn, the pioneer Bishop of New Zea- 
land, and James Coleridge Patteson, the martyr 
Bishop of Melanesia, chanced to call at the island. 
They had met Mrs. Paton—then the picture of per- 
fect health—a few months previously, and were 
shocked beyond measure to learn the story of the 
missionary’s sorrow. ‘Standing with me beside the 
grave of mother and child,’ says Dr. Paton, ‘I weep- 
ing aloud on his right hand, and Patteson sobbing 
silently on his left, the good Bishop Selwyn poured 
out his heart to God amidst sobs and tears, during 
which he laid his hands on my head and invoked 
heaven’s richest consolations and blessings on me 
and my trying labors. The virtue of that kind of 
episcopal consecration I did, and do, most warmly 
appreciate.’ To the end of his days, Dr. Selwyn 
used to speak of Dr. Paton as one of the bravest 
and one of the saintliest men he had ever met. 

It was thus, at the very outset of his illustrious 
career, that Dr. Paton discovered the divine depend- 
ability of his text. 

‘Lo, Ll am with you alway! 

‘I was never altogether forsaken! 


136 A Casket of Cameos 


‘The ever-merciful Lord sustained me! 

‘But for Jesus, 1 must have gone mad and died!’ 

‘Lo, 1 am with you alway, even unto the end! 

In his extremity, J. G. Paton threw himself upon 
the promise; and the promise held. 


V 


Through the eventful years that followed, the text 
was his constant companion. He faces death in a 
hundred forms, but the episode invariably closes with 
some such record as this: 


During the crisis, I felt generally calm and firm of soul, 
standing erect and with my whole weight on the promise, 
Lo, I am with you alway. Precious promise! How often 
I adore Jesus for it and rejoice in it! Blessed be His 
name! 


or this: 


I have always felt that His promise, Lo, I am with you 
alway, is a reality, and that He is with His servants to 
support and bless them even unto the end of the world. 


From many such instances, I cull one as typical of 
the rest. In 1862, the whole island was convulsed 
by tribal warfare. In their frenzy the natives threat- 
ened to destroy both the mission station and the 
missionary. Nowar, a friendly chief, urged Dr. 
Paton to fly into the bush and hide in a large chest- 
nut tree there. ‘Climb up into it,’ he said, ‘and re- 
main till the moon rises.’ He did so, and, concealed 


wu Se 


J. G. Paton’s Text 137 


in that leafy shelter, saw the blacks beating the 
bushes around in their eager search for himself. 

“The hours that I spent in that chestnut tree,’ 
writes Dr. Paton, ‘still live before me. I heard the 
frequent discharge of muskets and the hideous yells 
of the savages. Yet never, in all my sorrows, did 
my Lord draw nearer to me. I was alone yet not 
alone. I would cheerfully spend many nights alone 
in such a tree to feel again my Saviour’s spiritual 
presence as I felt it that night.’ 

About the hour of midnight a messenger came to 
advise him to go down to the beach. ‘Pleading for 
my Lord’s continued presence, I could but obey. 
My life now hung on a very slender thread. But 
my comfort and joy sprang from the words Lo, 
I am with you alway. Pleading this promise, I fol- 
lowed my guide.’ 

The crisis passed. ‘I confess,’ Dr. Paton says, 
‘that I often felt my brain reeling, my sight coming 
and going, and my knees smiting together when thus 
brought face to face with a violent death. Still, I 
was never left without hearing that promise coming 
up through the darkness and the anguish in all its 
consoling and supporting power: Lo, 1 am with you 
alway.’ 

Some years later, Dr. Paton married again, and 
settled at Aniwa. But, on a notable occasion, he 
revisited Tanna. Old Nowar was delighted and 
begged them to remain. . 

‘We have plenty of food,’ he assured Mrs. Paton. 


138 A Casket of Cameos 


‘While I have a yam or a banana, you shall not 
want.’ Mrs. Paton said that she was sure of it. 

‘We are many!’ he cried, pointing to his warriors; 
‘we are strong; we can always protect you!’ 

‘I am not afraid,’ she smilingly replied. 

‘Then,’ says Dr. Paton, ‘he led us to that chestnut- 
tree in the branches of which I had sheltered during 
that lonely and memorable night when all hope of 
earthly deliverance had perished, and said to Mrs. 
Paton, with a manifest touch of genuine emotion, 
“The God who protected Missi in the tree will 
always protect you!” ’ 

The Form in the Furnace—the Form that was 
like unto the Son of God—was seen by Nebuchad- 
nezzar as well as by the Three Hebrew Children. 
And the Presence of Him who had said Lo, J am 
with you alway was recognized by the barbarians of 
Tanna, as well as by Dr. Paton himself. Their 
sharp eyes soon detected that the white man was 
never left to his own resources. 


VI 


Dr. Paton lived to be eighty-three, and his prom- 
ise never failed him. Even when he was weakest, 
Mr. Langridge says, his heart never doubted for a 
moment, and, whenever any one came to see him, he 
rejoiced to tell them how unclouded was the peace 
within, and how intensely real and sustaining he 
found the promises of God’s Word. He used often 
to say, ‘With me there is not a shadow or a cloud: 





J. G. Paton’s Text 139 


all is perfect peace and joy in believing.’ A moment 
after his last breath had been drawn, the lines of 
pain were smoothed from his fine face, as by an 
invisible hand. He had actually gazed upon the 
Saviour, whose vivid presence had been the radiant 
reality of his life. God’s great sunrise had broken 
upon him with even richer splendor; and, as the 
clouds reflect the afterglow of sunset, so his pale 
face reflected the afterglow of that beatific vision. 
He was laid to rest next day in the grave that I 
visited this afternoon; and now every pilgrim to 
his sepulchre sees his text boldly inscribed upon 
his tomb. 


XII 
SANTA TERESA’S (TEXT 


I 


THE man who has once fallen under the spell of 
Santa Teresa will carry her image in his heart for- 
ever after. Especially will he think of her when he 
walks beside the sea, strolls along the river bank, or 
traces the tortuous windings of some upland stream. 
For, with Teresa, the love of water was a deathless 
passion. In her romantic pilgrimages along the 
highways and by-ways of Spain, she would listen 
entranced if she heard the babble of a brook, the 
tumbling of a mountain torrent or the deep murmur 
of a distant waterfall. She thought that earth held 
nothing more beautiful than the rainbow athwart the 
spray of a cascade. And whenever, on reaching the 
crest of a hill, she caught a glimpse of some glassy 
lake or noble river flashing in the sunlight, she 
would clap her hands in a frenzy of delight. She 
loved to bathe her feet in the purling waters; and 
when, just beside the road, a crystal spring gushed 
from its nest of ferns and mosses, she gathered her 
nuns around her, laved her hands in the delicious 
fountain, and seemed to draw some spiritual re- 
freshment from the sight and sound of the sparkling 


140 


———_ ee 


ES a — 


Santa Teresa’s Text IAL 


rill. To the very last, this ruling passion of her 
life was strong within her. “Withered and old, and 
fast nearing the goal of htr desires, the windings 
of the river which she skirted on one of her last 
journeys on earth—the journey from Plasencia to 
Soria—roused her enthusiastic admiration.’ So says 
Mrs. Cunninghame Graham, in her Life and Times 
of Santa Teresa; and, later on, she has another 
striking paragraph. for, on the road to Burgos, 
Teresa and her nuns are baulked by a river in full 
flood. 

‘Now then, my daughters,’ cries the intrepid old 
woman—she is sixty-seven and paralytic at that— 
‘I will cross first: if I am drowned, you must on 
no account attempt it!’ 

So saying, with one of her merry smiles, she 
plunges boldly into the cauldron of swirling waters 
and safely reaches the opposite bank. Water is her 
element: it has no terror for her: she loved it as a 
little child, and her affection for it remains constant 
to the last. 

With Santa Teresa it was water, water every- 
where and water all the time. It was the hearing 
of a story of the mystic waters that first inclined 
her heart towards the Saviour. Her teaching is 
illustrated throughout by the symbolism of the 
stream. She seems to think in the terms of the 
pool and the cataract, the well and the shower, 
the laughing rivulet and the unfathomable ocean 
depths. 


142 A Casket of Cameos 


If 


It was a great day in the life of Teresa when it 
first occurred to her that Jesus was as fond of the 
waters as she was. It was a picture that brought this 
home to her; and, as long as she lived, she thought 
of the picture with peculiar fondness and gratitude. 
It hung in her own room in the home of her girl- 
hood. It represented Jesus resting on the well, 
talking to the woman of Samaria. ‘Oh, how often,’ 
she says in her autobiography, ‘how often do | 
meditate on the living water of which our Lord 
spoke to the woman of Samaria! That story has 
a great attraction for me; and, indeed, so it had 
when | was a little child, though I did not under- 
stand it then as I do now. I had in my room a 
picture representing Jesus at the well. Underneath 
it, was the inscription: Lord, give me this water! 
I used to kneel down before the picture and pray 
much to our Lord that I, too, might drink of the 
wonderful water of which He was speaking.’ 

It was many years before that girlish prayer was 
answered; indeed, it was many years before Teresa 
was ready for the answer. The living water only 
comes to the thirsty soul; and, as yet, the soul of 


Teresa knew no such deep and passionate desire. 


The thought of water fascinated her; the incident 
depicted in the picture seemed to her very affecting; 
the Saviour’s condescension struck her as exquisitely 
beautiful; and she felt, in some vague way, that 


—— spas a SN Baal 
CP a ee eS ee ae 


AE ome at 





Ce oe TD 


ea. ee 


‘ a iS as 





santa Teresa’s Text 143 


she, too, would like to receive water at His hands; 
but that was all. Teresa was bubbling over with 
life and merriment. She was essentially a child of 
her period; and her period was the gayest and most 
romantic in Spain’s romantic history. She was 
extraordinarily beautiful—‘tall; well-shaped; with 
a fine complexion; round, brilliant, black eyes; black 
hair, crisp and curly; good teeth and firmly chis- 
elled lips and nose’—and she quickly learned to dis- 
play her charms to the best advantage. The frivol- 
ity of her girlhood afterwards troubled her. ‘T paid 
a great deal of attention to dress,’ she tells us, ‘and 
was anxious that everybody should think me pretty.’ 
She made it her business to keep her small dainty 
hands most scrupulously white, and she spent a vast 
amount of time before her mirror in arranging her 
luxurious black tresses. ‘I was fond of perfumes,’ 
she says, ‘and of all the vanities within my reach— 
and they were many—but I had no evil intention 
in using them.’ Of course not. It is with a light 
and girlish heart that Teresa revels in the flowers 
and fields and forests about her father’s home; it 
is with a light and girlish heart that she lingers on 
the image of her graceful form and pretty face as 
she admires them in the mirror; it is with a light and 
girlish heart that, at the age of seven, she takes her 
brother’s hand and sets off along the dusty road to 
Salamanca that they may win for themselves, among 
the Moors, the glorious crown of martyrdom; and 
it is with a light and girlish heart that she kneels be- 


TA4 A Casket of Cameos 


fore the picture and repeats, over and over and over 
again, the prayer inscribed beneath it: Lord, give me 
this water! Lord, give me this water! ‘J did not 
understand it then,’ she writes, half a century later. 
It was not with a light and girlish heart that the 
woman in the picture begged for the living water; 
it was not with a light and girlish heart that Teresa 
herself eventually sought that satisfying stream. 


{Il 


Not that Teresa had to surrender her natural 
gaiety in order to secure the Saviour’s grace. By 
no means. Without that gaiety Teresa would not 
have been Teresa. She loved water because water 
is the natural emblem of vivacity. It ripples and 
splashes and foams and thunders: it is full of ani- 
mation and life. Teresa herself was vivacious to the 
end of the chapter. The cloisters of Avila resounded 
with her peals of merry laughter. She laughed for 
the sheer joy of it when things went well; and mis- 
fortunes only appealed to her sense of the ludicrous. 
One bitter winter’s night, when the poor nuns at 
Toledo could not find enough bedclothes to keep 
their teeth from chattering, Teresa lit her taper, 
went the round of the establishment, poked fun at 
the capes, coats, cloths and improvised quilts under 
which the girls were shivering, and soon had the 
whole place rocking with merriment. When Fray 
Juan painted her portrait and brought it to her— 
the portrait that still stands as the frontispiece of 





Santa Teresa’s Text i45 


her writing and biographies—she broke into im- 
moderate laughter. How could she who had always 
been so proud of her own loveliness recognize her- 
self in the blear-eyed and hard featured old woman 
whose grim and heavy visage stared sternly at her 
from the canvas? Believing, as she said, that God 
likes to walk among the pots and pipkins, she became 
a most accomplished cook; but, when a meal was 
spoiled through some poor sister’s blunder in the 
kitchen, she turned it into a jest at table, and the 
incident passed in a ripple of silvery mirth. During 
the fifteen years of her pilgrimages along the great 
Andalusian highroads, she kept her companions in 
so blithe a mood that they found it easy to forget 
their weariness. She cultivated a sharp eye for the 
whimsical side of every object that they passed; 
she enlivened every step of the way with clever 
puns and haunting couplets; for Teresa was a born 
wit. The most eminent critics agree that the humor 
of Cervantes is neither more delicious nor more 
dainty than that of Teresa. She discountenanced 
all murmurs and complaints, and was never once 
heard to say an unkind word of anybody. She 
dearly loved a game: one of her most telling illus- 
trations is drawn from her experiences at chess. In- 
to her convents she introduced musical instruments 
—the pipe, the flute, the drum, the cymbals, and the 
tambourine—and trained her nuns to join her in 
glees and lively melodies; she liked the place to. 
resound with evidence of their mutual happiness. 


146 A Casket of Cameos 


She could never pass a little child on the road with- 
out running to kiss it; she shouted for joy when she 
caught sight of a brightly-colored butterfly ; she liked 
her nuns to look pretty, and she had nicknames and 
pet-names for them all. She did all that she pos- 
sibly could to keep them blithe. ‘No words,’ says 
one of her biographers, ‘can give any idea of the 
glad cheerfulness, the holy joy, the serene com- 
posure which reigned in that little world, as it still 
reigns to-day in many of Teresa’s convents. Melan- 
choly in a cloister! God forbid! Teresa dreaded 
the melancholy as the plague; a person infected with 
it was to be refused admittance to her convents: 
Teresa liked nuns of clear and serene understand- 
ings and unclouded brows. It never once occurred 
to ‘Teresa that she was called upon to make a choice 
between her laughter on the one hand and ever- 
lasting life on the other. ‘It would be dreadful,’ 
she writes, ‘if we could not seek the Saviour until 
we were dead to this world. Neither the Magdalen, 
nor the woman of Samaria, nor she of Canaan, were 
dead to it when they found Him.’ 

The woman of Samaria! ‘Teresa’s thoughts never 
wander far from the picture that hung in the old 
bedroom at home. No; the woman of Samaria had 
not lost her love of life. Was it not living water for 
which she asked? Wherein, then, lay the difference 
between the prayer of the little Spanish girl in front 
of the picture and the prayer of the Samaritan 
woman in the picture? Wherein lay the difference 


Santa Teresa’s Text 147 


between the oft-repeated prayer offered by Teresa as 
a child—‘Give me this water! give me this water !’— 
and the same prayer offered years afterwards by the 
very self-same lips? 


IV 


The angel who records earth’s requests and 
heaven’s responses would probably tell us that 
Teresa’s later prayer was itself the answer to 
Teresa’s earlier cry. When, as a little girl, Teresa 
kneeled before the picture, she was not thirsty. She 
was animated, partly by a child’s propensity to imi- 
tate its senior, and, partly, by the irresistible fascina- 
tion that water—a well of water—living water— 
always had for her. Heaven does not moisten the 
lips that are not thirsty; but the girlish cry is regis- 
tered; and, when the thirst comes, the living water 
is immediately ministered. 

The time came when poor Teresa was not only 
thirsty, but terribly and tragically thirsty. In at- 
tempting to describe her sensations, the only sym- 
bolism of which she can think is the symbolism of 
the parched and burning desert. “O my aridity,’ 
she cries, ‘my great and intolerable aridity! She is 
a nun, it is true, but she will not be a hypocrite. 
She abandons prayer as hopeless. How can she 
pray with her lips when there is no glad and grate- 
ful worship welling up from her soul? “O my God,’ 
she cries, “I am amazed at the hardness of my wicked 
heart!’ Yet, just as the silence of the desert is 


148 A Casket of Cameos 


itself one great cry for water, so the silence of 
Teresa’s soul is but a magnified, intensified echo of 
her girlish cry. ‘Water! Water! Living water! 
Lord, give me this water! give me ths water? And 
that passionate cry was heard. 

During the years that followed, she wrote a 
treatise on the spiritual life—a treatise that still 
stands among our choicest religious classics. But, 
from the first page to the last, the imagery is colored 
by the unforgettable experience of that dreadful 
period. She likens the soul to a garden in which 
grains and vegetables, beautiful flowers and sweet- 
smelling herbs, should flourish. But it is parched 
and dry. How is the owner to make it fresh and 
fruitful? There are four ways, she says. And she 
pictures him laboriously drawing water from a well, 
becoming exhausted long before the whole garden 
has been moistened; again, she pictures him toiling 
at a water-wheel with scarcely more success; and, a 
third time, she pictures him carrying water to his 
garden from a neighboring stream. Then, having, 
with a skillful hand, drawn the spiritual analogies in 
each case, she proceeds to the fourth source of re- 
freshment. The rain; the water that falls from 
heaven; the life that comes to the garden from 
above! But for it, the well will soon be empty; the 
water-wheel will revolve in vain; and the bed of the 
stream will be dry. Everything depends upon the 
water that must be divinely given. And, with the 
old picture in mind, she tells the story of One who 


eS _ 


Santa Teresa’s Text 149 


sat by Jacob’s well, One to whom the Woman of 
Samaria—and she herself—had cried: Lord, give 
me this water! give me this water! 


Mi 


But, in Teresa’s mind, there was a yet deeper 
resemblance between the woman at the well and her- 
self. The outstanding factor in the New Testament 
story—the thing that the Samaritan woman herself 
could never forget—was that Jesus revealed to her 
her sin—and forgave it. In exactly the same way, 
the outstanding factor in the life of Teresa—the 
thing that she could never forget—was that Jesus 
had revealed to her her sin and forgiven it. 

Others called her “Saint Teresa, she signs her- 
self “Teresa the Sinner” As her nuns knelt around 
her deathbed, she magnified the grace that had dealt 
so wonderfully with her. ‘My children,’ she ex- 
claimed, ‘I have been the greatest sinner in the 
world! And she meant it. She had not sinned as 
the Woman of Samaria had sinned; Teresa was the 
soul of purity; her love of water was the expression 
of her passion for all things clean and cleansing. 
But, for all that, she was conscious that her soul 
was soiled. To others, she may have seemed a para- 
gon of virtue; but, as Francis de Sales observes, 
‘the defects that are scarcely perceptible to the ordi- 
nary run of mortals, appear to those who are striv- 
ing after perfection, as the most grave and heinous 
transgressions.’ “My wickedness,’ cries Teresa, ‘ap- 


gee iN A Casket of Cameos 


pears to me so enormous that I look upon my sins 
as the cause of all the heresy and misery that have 
come upon the world.’ She had a vision of hell and 
she saw her own place in it. The vision was, she 
says, one of the greatest mercies that God ever be- 
stowed upon her, for whenever afterwards trials 
and sufferings came upon her, she contrasted their 
painfulness with the unutterable horror of her 
vision. And, even as she gazed upon her place in 
that abode of torment, she could not help feeling 
that it was pleasant as compared with the still more 
dreadful doom that her iniquities deserved. Her 
sins were her sorrow day and night. The remem- 
brance of them was grievous unto her, the burden 
of them was intolerable. 

She lost her burden where the Woman of Samaria 
lost hers—in the presence of the Saviour. There 
came to her, after twenty years of convent life, an 
overwhelming vision of the pathos and power of the 
Cross. Under such circumstances, as Froude re- 
marks, Protestants and Catholics experience an iden- 
tical emotion. ‘Each poor sinner recognizes, as by a 
flash of lightning, that these tortures were endured 
for him or her—that he or she was actually present 
in the Saviour’s mind when He was suffering on 
the cross. The thought, when it comes, is over- 
powering. Teresa was dissolved in tears. She sur- 
rendered herself wholly and forever to the Being 
whose form was fastened on her soul. Her spiritual 
life had begun.’ So Froude tells the story of her 


Santa Teresa’s Text ISI 


conversion: her own narrative is much more 
affecting, but it is lengthy. She has seen, so she 
tells her confessor, the Christ, the living Christ: 
the sweetness, light and peace that poured them- 
selves into her soul are indescribable; henceforth 
she can only sing for very gladness: she sings as 
they alone only can sing to whom much has been 
forgiven. Teresa has an immense correspondence; 
but from that time she seals all her communications 
with a seal that contains five matchless letters—the 
letters JESUS. 


VI 


The Woman of Samaria left the well and went 
back to the world to make history. The whole city 
was changed as a result of her conversion. So was 
it with Teresa. She dedicated her transfigured life 
to the purification and reformation of the religious 
establishments of Spain; and her work was so won- 
derful that, when she died, she was made the patron 
saint of her grateful country. When the time of 
her departure came, her death was as lovely as her 
life. She gathered about her the nuns who were as 
dear to her as daughters. She repeated with them 
the greatest of our penitential psalms, just such a 
psalm, as, in dying, the Woman of Samaria might 
have recited: ‘Create in me aclean heart, O God. 
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken 
and a contrite heart Thou wilt not despise. She 
clung to the words, uttering them again and again 


152 A Casket of Cameos 


Then ‘O my Lord,’ she exclaimed, ‘the hour that I 
have so much longed for has come at last: the time 
has surely come that we shall see one another!’ And, 
with a gentle sigh, she set out—to use her own 
words—not to a strange country, but to her native 
land, since it was the land in which He dwelt whom 
she so loved and who so loved her. 


XIII 
SYDNEY DOBELL’S TEXT 


it 


Is there a preacher living who has not, at some time 
or other, felt unutterably thankful that the New 
Testament contains the story of the Dying Thief? 
Sooner or later there comes to every minister the 
experience that, in George Macdonald’s Malcolm, 
came to Mr. Graham, the schoolmaster. The Mar- 
quis of Lossie is dying, and, in dying, is desperately 
anxious about the salvation of his soul. It seems 
to him that the situation is hopeless; it is too late! 
‘There’s no time!’ he almost shrieks, ‘no time! no 
time! xo time!’ And Mr. Graham replies by recit- 
ing to his lordship the story of the thief upon the 
cross—‘that most blessed thief who stole the king- 
dom of heaven.’ 

‘It makes my heart swell to think of it, my lord,’ 
says Mr. Graham. ‘It is not too late! The Saviour 
demands nothing of you which you are not able to 
perform! With your last breath you can cry to 
Him, and He will hear you, as He heard the thief 
who was dying on the cross beside Him. “Lord, 
remember me,’ he cried, “when Thou comest into 
Thy kingdom.” And the Saviour answered, “To- 


153 


154 A Casket of Cameos 


day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.” It makes 
my heart swell to think of it! No cross-question- 
ing of the poor fellow! No preaching to him! He 
just took him with Him where He was going to 
make a man of him!’ 

‘To-day,’ the Saviour said, ‘thou shalt be with Me 
in Paradise!’ 

‘“To-day!”’ exclaims a great French preacher, 
‘what prompittude! “With Me!’ what company! 
“In Paradise!” what bliss? 

‘It makes my heart swell to think of it!’ says the 
schoolmaster; and he is by no means alone. This 
tragic but tender story has made its poignant appeal 
to men and women of every condition and of every 
age. To two classes of people—two classes that 
stand in striking contrast the one with the other— 
the story has particularly appealed. It has appealed, 
on the one hand, to those who, like the Marquis of 
Lossie, find themselves faced in their last hour by 
a most desperate extremity; and, on the other, it 
has appealed to those whose very immunity from 
such deplorable conditions has tended to foster a re- 
liance upon their own innocence and goodness. If 
ever a mortal was entitled to enter Paradise by 
some door other than that by which the Dying Thief 
was admitted, it was the Countess of Huntingdon. 
The Countess spent all her years, all her strength 
and all her fortune in doing good. Yet, when it 
came to preparing her soul for the immediate 
presence of her Saviour, she found infinite comfort 





sydney Dobell’s Text 155 


in the story that made Mr. Graham’s heart swell 
with thankfulness. ‘I have,’ the Countess exclaimed, 
on the last day of her life, ‘I have no hope but 
that which inspired the Dying Thief at the side of 
my Lord. I must be saved in the same way, as 
freely and as fully, or not at all.’ 

And so the whole story is a study in black and 
white, a study in light and shade, a study in sharp 
and vivid contrasts. There is the contrast between 
the criminal guilt of the thief and the sacrificial 
innocence of the Saviour: there is the contrast be- 
tween the affecting penitence of the one felon and 
the callous indifference of the other; and there is 
the contrast between the two classes of people to 
whom the story has particularly appealed. In a 
casual kind of way, I have already instanced the 
Marquis of Lossie as a representative of the one 
class and the Countess of Huntingdon as a repre- 
sentative of the other. Let me now call two other 
witnesses—one, like the Countess of Huntingdon, 
from history, and the other, like the Marquis of 
Lossie, from fiction. From history, as a type of 
the one class, I cite Sydney Dobell: from fiction, as 
a type of the other, I cite Tom Gibbons. 


It 


If ever a man wore the white flower of a blame- 
less life, it was Sydney Dobell. His life-story is an 
idyll of innocence. As soon as he was born, he was 
‘little angel-face,’ and his delighted parents, wor- 


156 A Casket of Cameos 


shipping every trifle that those baby fingers touched, 
set themselves to guard their treasure from every 
contaminating influence. He never went to school 
or college or university; he was educated most care- 
fully and most thoroughly by chosen tutors in the 
home; Mr. and Mrs. Dobell trembled lest, in con- 
tact with others, the slightest taint should sully the 
perfect purity of their boy’s innocent mind. On 
every suitable occasion, the father would lead his 
boy to some quiet corner of the home, or to some 
lovely spot in the beautiful grounds, and would tell 
him the story of Jesus. And, laying his hand on 
Sydney’s head and looking into his face, he in- 
variably concluded the recital by saying how delight- 
ful it would be if another child should arise who 
would make it his supreme ambition to walk in the 
Saviour’s footsteps, to live a holy, spotless and un- 
selfish life, and to serve his fellowmen every day by 
doing his heavenly Father’s will. The mother was 
no less earnest. “Oh, how precious he was in my 
eyes!’ she says. ‘Surely never were prayers more 
devoutly uttered than for him; never child more 
sincerely devoted to God than was the treasure of 
my heart, my firstborn! 

Their effort to fill their boy’s heart with a won- 
dering reverence and supreme affection for all high 
and holy things was crowned with remarkable suc- 
cess. He gloried in the fields and the woods; he 
was never so happy as when climbing the hills and 
exploring the valleys of the English countryside. 


| 
{ 





sydney Dobell’s Text 157 


He learned the lore of flowers and grasses and 
birds; his mind becanie steeped in the secrets of 
Nature’s most delicious solitudes. To the unbounded 
delight of his parents, he made the New Testament 
his constant companion, and exhibited for it an 
unmistakable and growing affection. He would 
take it with him on his rambles, read it in silence 
in the leafy depths of the forest or seated among the 
cowslips on the banks of the stream. And then, on 
his return, he would carefully write out the 
passages that had most impressed him and note 
down the thoughts that had been suggested to his 
mind. 

It was inevitable that a child so reared should be 
precocious, old-fashioned, abnormal. Moving so 
much in the society of his seniors, he matured 
quickly. He talked as grown-up people talked, and 
behaved pretty much as they do. When he was ten, 
a little girl of his own age visited the home, and 
Sydney fell violently in love with her. Five years 
afterwards—their minds remaining steadfast—the 
two became engaged; and, five years later still, at 
the age of twenty, they were married. When, in 
the full vigor of manhood, he began to move among 
men, he brought into the busy world the captivating 
innocence, the simple faith and the sunny sweetness 
of temper that had characterized his childhood, and 
all men capitulated to ‘his charm. He was a striking 
and attractive figure, every way. He would have 
made a model for a Grecian sculptor. People 


158 A Casket of Cameos 


turned on the street to take a second glance at him. 
He looked for all the world like some Castilian 
knight who had magically escaped from a volume 
of romance. He was tall, muscular and athletic, of 
graceful carriage and elastic stride. Revelling in 
the open air, his complexion was sunburnt and 
weather-beaten; whilst about his handsome face, 
with its deep blue eyes, there clustered a picturesque 
wealth of nut-brown hair. His fine features gave 
an irresistible impression of massiveness and prince- 
liness; his whole appearance was arresting, magnetic 
and imposing. 

Travel and intercourse with men swiftly broad- 
ened his mind and supplied, in large measure, the 
discipline that his severe isolation had denied him. 
The brooding thoughts of his long and lonely hours 
found expression in poesy; and, as soon as his poems 
were published, he had the world at his feet. Car- 
lyle begged that he might be instantly supplied with 
every line that trickled from his magic pen. He 
made many distinguished friendships and kept them 
to the end. Browning and Tennyson, Mazzini and 
Ruskin, George Macdonald and Holman Hunt, 
Hugh Miller and Sir James Simpson, Thomas Car- 
lyle and Charlotte Bronté were all of his circle; and, 
in each case, his friendship was highly prized. And, 
everywhere, the thing that fascinated everybody was 
the exquisite beauty of his simplicity, the bewitching 
charm of his unaffected innocence. . 

And the best of it was that, in the days of his 





Sydney Dobell’s Text 159 


renown, he clung with unswerving tenacity to the 
things that, as a boy, he had learned to cherish. He 
still loved the green hills and the wooded valleys, 
and he travelled thousands of miles to feast his 
eyes on Europe’s loveliest landscapes. He still 
treasured his New Testament and never moved 
without it. ‘As a child,’ he says, ‘I learned the 
New Testament by heart, and I cannot unlearn the 
beauty of those sweet old Saxon phrases which I 
have loved so long. Full of the light that never was 
on sea or shore—the light of the holiest, happiest and 
best of recollections—I seem, in using them, to 
mingle a new element with earthly speech and re- 
lieve with their glory the dreary lifelessness of 
words.’ His faith in the majestic simplicity of the 
everlasting gospel deepened and ripened with the 
years. He could not understand how any man, who 
had once realized the sweetness and power of the 
divine love, could forsake the pure fountain of his 
first faith. ‘To me,’ he wrote, ‘there is no other 
name given under heaven among men whereby we 
must be saved. I shall never believe that the faith 
once delivered to the saints has grown obsolete till 
I see another faith delivered by the same hand to 
replace it. By God’s help I will abide by Christ till 
Christ Himself shall release me. Till the veil of the 
temple is rent, I will worship there.’ 

The veil of the temple was rent early. He was 
only fifty. One lovely summer’s evening, as his 
favorite rooks were winging their homeward way 


160 A Casket of Cameos 


across the sky in front of his windows, his last 
breath was quietly drawn. The fading sunshine 
of a gorgeous August evening lay rich and deep 
upon the scene he loved so dearly. The arms of 
his wife were round him, and his hand was held by 
his mother. A happy smile played about his lips. 
The friends who gazed upon his face next day said 
that they had never seen anything so beautiful. He 
is buried in a lovely garden. The handsome granite 
cross, erected by his wife, which marks the spot in 
which he slumbers, is surrounded on every hand by 
pleasant lawns, evergreen shrubs, sweet-smelling 
herbs, well-kept flower beds, and all things fair and 
sweet. The air is choral with the hum of insects 
and the song of birds. It is a fitting resting-place 
for one of the most charming and blameless of Eng- 
lishmen. Sydney Dobell was, as Professor James 
would say, ‘a sky-blue soul,’ with no cloud any- 
where; his path shone more and more unto the 
perfect day. 

But what has all this to do with the story of the 
Dying Thief? Much, every way. Sydney Dobell 
knew his New Testament from cover to cover. He 
learned it by heart, both in the original and in his 
native tongue. And, knowing the sacred volume 
through and through, one text stood out from all 
the rest. Some years before he died he gave in- 
structions that it was to be inscribed upon his coffin. 
And it was. For there, on the coffin that was low- 
ered into that garden-grave, was the dying thief’s 





sydney Dobell’s Text 161 


petition: Lord, remember me when Thou comest 
into Thy Kingdom. To his fellow men Sydney 
Dobell seemed to be the sweetest, sunniest and most 
stainless soul that any of them had known; yet 
when he passed into the presence of his Lord, he 
ranged himself with the thief on the cross, and, in 
a sincerity that sprang from his sense of inmost 
need, he made the malefactor’s prayer his own. ‘I 
must be saved as the dying thief was saved or not 
at all,’ exclaimed the Countess of Huntingdon on 
her deathbed; and Sydney Dobell was of precisely 
the same mind. 


iil 


By way of contrast, we turn to Tom Gibbons. 
Tom Gibbons is one of Peter B. Kyne’s creations. 
He is the worst of the Three Bad Men in The 
Three Godfathers. The Three Bad Men have just 
raided the Wickenburg National Bank and are fly- 
ing for their lives across the desert. There were, at 
first, four of them; but one was killed in the raid, 
and one of the three survivors is wounded. Out in 
the desert the three fugitives come upon a wagon 
beside a water-hole. The water-hole is dry; and the 
owner of the wagon, disappointed and alarmed, has 
lost his life in the course of a hopeless search for 
water. The dead man has left his young wife in 
the wagon, and, shortly after the arrival of the 
Three Bad Men, a baby is born. The three des- 
peradoes pity the poor young mother; but they can- 


162 A Casket of Cameos 


not help her; and she dies. But, in dying, she asks 
their names; makes them the godfathers of her 
baby; and solemnly commits him to their charge. 
They resolve that, at any sacrifice, they will save 
the baby’s life. 

As soon as the mother is dead, it occurs to them 
that she must have made some provision for the 
child; and they search the wagon. They find all 
that they need and—a Bible! Then they set out to 
fulfill their vow. How can it be done? How can 
the baby be carried across the desert and committed 
to some woman’s arms? Tom Gibbons, the Worst 
Bad Man, feels that he can do a little; but he cannot 
hope to get the baby safely to civilization. Bill Kear- 
ney, the Wounded Bad Man, feels the same. Then 
it occurs to these two that if, for awhile, they do 
all that they can to save Bob Sangster, the Young- 
est Bad Man, he may be able to carry the baby to 
safety after they have fallen. Bob Sangster is 
little more than a boy; the bank-raid was his first 
adventure of the kind; the two old hands resolve 
to nurse his strength for the final endeavor. The 
Wounded Bad Man carries the baby as far as he 
can. But a time comes when he sinks in the desert, 
closes his eyes, and makes it clear that he will never 
stagger to his feet again. He asks for the Bible. 
The Youngest Bad Man gets it and reads to him. 
He selects the story of the Dying Thief. ‘And he 
said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when Thou 
comest into Thy Kingdom. And Jesus said unto 





Sydney Dobell’s Text 163 


him, Verily I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be 
with Me in Paradise.’ 

‘That'll do, Bob! exclaims the dying man; and, 
shortly after, they hear him murmuring to himself 
the prayers his mother taught him. And, when he 
passes, his mind is still pondering the passage he had 
just heard read. “Don’t—let—my—godson—die— 
between—two—thieves! he says. “And,’ adds Mr. 
Kyne, ‘some time during the night, the angels came 
and led Bill Kearney into Paradise.’ Paradise! 
‘Thou shalt be with Me in Paradise! 

The Worst Bad Man, Tom Gibbons, carries the 
baby as long as he can struggle on. Then he, too, 
sinks upon the sand. And, in the awful delirium 
of death, he cries again and again: Lord, remember 
me when Thou comest into Thy Kingdom! ‘And 
perhaps,’ says Mr. Kyne, ‘perhaps there came back 
to him a message that only the Worst Bad Man 
could understand—the message of hope eternal 
sounding down the ages—To-day thou shalt be with 
Me wm Paradise? And, from his comrade’s arms, 
the Youngest Bad Man takes the baby for whom 
one good woman and two bad men have died, and, 
after a desperate struggle, carries him to safety. 


IV 


‘It makes my heart swell to think of tt, my Lord! 
says Mr. Graham, as he tells the dying Marquis the 
story of the Dying Thief. 


164 A Casket of Cameos 


‘I must be saved as he was or not at all! exclaims 
the aged Countess of Huntingdon. 

‘That ll do! That'll do! cry Mr. Kyne’s des- 
peradoes, as they listen to the touching record. 

‘Give me, prayed Copernicus upon his deathbed, 
‘give me that grace of repentance and of faith which 
was vouchsafed, im his last hour, to the thief upon 
the cross! 

‘I range myself beside him and make his prayer 
my own,’ says Sydney Dobell. ‘I wish his words 
inscribed upon my coffin as the cry of my own heart. 
For,’ he adds, ‘to me there is no other name given 
among men whereby we must be saved! 

And he—whoever he may be—who relies upon 
the mighty virtues of that Name, and learns to pray 
the malefactor’s prayer, will never fail to hear 
within the secrecy of his soul the gracious and 
divine response: Thou shali be with Me! With 
Me wm Paradise! 


ac tt el Be, 


XIV 
OCLC LN INE YS Ub X E 


I 


CHARLES GRANDISON FINNEY was a lawyer to his 
finger-tips. It was his law-books that made a Chris- 
tian of him. In a sense of which Paul never 
dreamed, ‘the law was his schoolmaster to lead him 
to Christ” When at the age of twenty-six, he en- 
tered the office of Mr. Benjamin Wright, a promi- 
nent attorney in Jefferson County, New York, he 
was, he assures us, as ignorant of religion as a 
heathen. He had not heard half a dozen sermons 
in his life, and had never felt the slightest interest 
in the matters with which the preachers dealt. But 
the law-books cured all that. The law-books opened 
his eyes. ‘In studying law,’ he says, ‘I found the — 
old authors frequently quoting the Scriptures, and 
referring especially to the Mosaic enactments as 
authority for many of the great principles of com- 
mon law. This excited my curiosity so much that 
I went and purchased a Bible, the first I had ever 
owned; and whenever I found a reference by the 
law-authors to the Bible, I turned to the passage 
and consulted it in its connection. This led to my 
taking a deep interest in the Bible.’ 

From that time forth, the young student lived on 
his law-books and his Bible. The two classes of 


165 


166 A Casket of Cameos 


literature were always within reach. Sometimes the 
one was uppermost and sometimes the other. As 
long as the Bible appealed only to his legal and in- 
tellectual faculties, he allowed it to lie about his desk 
like any other book of reference. ‘It never oc- 
curred to me,’ he says, ‘to be ashamed of reading it.’ 
But, when the Bible began to strike a deeper note, 
and to awaken in his soul spiritual convictions and 
responses, a singular sensitiveness crept over him. 
‘I kept my Bible out of sight. If I was reading it 
when anybody came in, I would throw my law- 
books upon it.’ And so the law-books and the Bible 
shared his heart between them. In the end, the 
Bible won. Little by little, the Bible took its place 
as the Supreme Assize, the Final Court of Appeal, 
the one august tribunal to which all questions were 
submitted. ‘I felt myself shut up to my Bible,’ 
he says. 

The law-books had to take second place to the 
Bible; but they never sank below that. Finney was 
a lawyer to the end of the chapter. He thought asa 
solicitor thinks; he pleaded as a barrister pleads; 
he had merely accepted, as he himself put it, a re- 
tainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead His 
cause. It soon became clear that, if he had declined 
that retainer, and pursued his profession in the or- 
dinary way, he would quickly have climbed to its 
highest places and won its most coveted prizes. His 
vigorous personality, his acute intellect and his per- 

suasive oratory would have secured for him the 


a ae 


i ek le a i el ——— 





Cc. G. Finney’s Text 167 


most dazzling distinctions that the courts and legis- 
latures of his country could confer. Somebody 
said that his preaching was ‘logic on fire.’ For this 
reason he appealed, as no other man ever appealed, 
to the legal mind. ‘I have always been particularly 
interested,’ he said, towards the close of his life, ‘in 
the salvation of members of the legal profession. | 
understood pretty well their habits of reading and 
thinking. I have always found that when the gos- 
pel was properly presented, they were the most 
accessible class; and, in proportion to their number, 
more of them have been converted than of any 
other class. I have often been impressed, in con- 
versing with members of the legal profession, by the 
manner in which they would consent to propositions 
to which persons of ill-disciplined minds would have 
objected.’ ‘It has often interested me to notice,’ he 
says again, ‘that when lawyers have come to my 
room, they were ready to submit to Christ the 
moment that their difficulties were cleared up. In- 
deed, they take a more intelligent view of the plan 
of salvation than any other class with whom I have 
-had to do.’ Finney believed that the gospel was 
pre-eminently reasonable. Unbelief, he argued, was 
an intellectual absurdity, a prostration and a stulti- 
fication of man’s proudest and stateliest powers. He 
saw an even loftier logic in Calvary than in Sinai. 
And, appealing to the intelligence, as well as to the 
conscience, of two continents, he gained, in an ex- 
traordinary way, the verdict that he sought. 


168 A Casket of Cameos 


II 


No preacher was privileged to take a hand in the 
conversion of Charles Finney. It was his Bible that 
did it; and one text in particular. As soon as that 
Bible of his began to touch that deeper chord within 
his soul, he separated it from the !aw-books at the 
office, took it home, and began to read it in secret. 
It was no longer a book of reference but a book of 
revelations. ‘Just at this point,’ he says, ‘the whole 
question of my personal salvation opened to my 
mind in a manner most marvellous at the time. I 
clearly saw the reality and fulness of the atonement 
of Christ. I saw that His work was a finished work 
—full and complete. And I saw that all that was 
necessary On my part was to get my own consent to 
give up my sins and accept the Saviour.’ 

Wanting in Him—Nothing! ‘I saw that His 
work is a finished work, full and complete!’ 

Wanting in Me—My Own Consent! ‘I saw that 
all that was necessary on my part was to get my 
own consent to give up my sins and accept the 
Saviour!’ 

It was on October 10, 1821—a day that he 
annually commemorated—that our young lawyer, 
with his keen, analytical mind, narrowed the issue 
down to this definite compass. It was early morn- 
ing. He had been reading his Bible before starting 
for the office. And, now that the crucial question 

stood out so clearly, he resolved to settle it once for 


ee eS ee 





C. G. Finney’s Text 169 


all. Just outside the village was a thick wood, 
choral with the song of birds and carpeted with wild 
flowers. Often on a summer’s evening, or on a 
Sunday, he had sought its delicious seclusion. He 
resolved to go to it, instead of to the office, on this 
misty autumn morning. Penetrating the thickest 
part of the forest, he found a place where several 
giant trees had fallen across each other, leaving an 
open space between. He resolved to make this 
enclosed space the sanctuary of his soul. As he 
crept into it he vowed that he would never leave it 
until he had received the assurance of salvation. He 
knelt in prayer; but there came no answer to his 
frantic supplication. He heard a rustling among 
the leaves; he fancied that his devotions were ob- 
served ; and he rose in confusion and dismay. Then, 
ashamed of his shame, he shouted at the top of his 
voice, declaring that he would not leave that wood- 
land retreat unforgiven, though all the men on earth 
and all the devils in hell stood gaping around him. 
“To think,’ he said, ‘that I should have been ashamed 
of being caught in the act of making my peace with 
my offended God! The wickedness of it appeared 
awful, infinite! It broke me down! And, with that 
outbreak of contrition, the light suddenly dawned! 
Like a bolt from the blue, a passage of Scripture 
shot into his heart: Ve shall seek Me and find Me 
when ye shall search for Me with ali your heart! 
Ye shall seek Me! 
Ye shall find Me! 


170 A Casket of Cameos 


When ye shall search with all your heart! 

‘I do not think,’ he says, ‘that I had ever read 
that passage, but I felt that it was the Word of 
God. I instantly seized hold of it with my whole 
heart. JI was as conscious of trusting at that 
moment in the veracity of my God as I was of my 
own existence. “Lord,” I cried, “I take Thee at Thy 
word! Thou knowest that I do search for Thee 
with all my heart. I have come to this place for that 
very purpose; and Thou hast promised that I shall 
find Thee!’ That seemed to settle the whole ques- 
tion. I felt that I had performed my vow.’ 

He had sought! 

He had found! 

For he had searched for God with all his heart! 

He walked back to the village and found that it 
was dinner-time; he had spent the whole morning 
in that leafy sanctuary! Devoting the afternoon to 
the office, he then went home. “There was no fire, 
and no light, in the room; yet it appeared to be 
perfectly light. As I went in and shut the door, 
it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to 
face. He said nothing, but simply stood before 
me; and I fell down at His feet and poured out my 
soul to Him.’ And there, in the evening, the work 
of the morning was consummated and crowned. 


tit 


With all thine heart! ‘The Spirit seemed,’ he 
says, ‘to lay stress on those four words: with all 








-_ Se a ee oe 


C. G. Finney’s Text “171 


thine heart’ ‘Ye shall seek Me and find Me when 
ye shall search for Me wrth all thine heart! 

With all thine heart! That is ever the stipulation ; 
of love. Love knows only one unpardonable sin:) 
it is the sin of apathy. She will overlook any other 
defect, but she can never forgive a phlegmatic lover. 
She capitulates unconditionally to the whole-hearted. 
With all thine heart! She loves the lover whose 
passion is never daunted; the lover whose love is a 
fire burning in his bones; the lover who will not take 
No for an answer. She loves to be courted with 
ardor, persistence and intensity. And these three 
priceless qualities—ardor, persistence and intensity 
—were the outstanding characteristics of Charles 
G. Finney. They shone through his conversion and 
they flamed through the great heroic life that fol- 
lowed. With all jis heart he believed; with all his 
heart he labored; and with all his heart he preached 
to countless thousands the everlasting gospel. 

His intensity was the intensity of a great fear. 
He felt that his sins had intervened between him 
and his God, and that, unless he could get rid of 
them, there was the gravest possible danger that the 
estrangement might prove permanent. The thought 
filled him with unutterable alarm; he often closed 
his Bible with a shudder. 

His intensity was the intensity of a great fasth. 
‘O woman, great is thy faith!’ said the Saviour to 
the Syro-Phoenician woman who would not be re- 
pulsed; and Finney’s faith was modelled on hers. ‘I 


172 A Casket of Cameos 


will never leave this place,’ he said, as he clambered 
over the fallen trees, “I will never leave this place 
until I have received the assurance of salvation!’ It 
was an echo of the faith that made Jacob a prince 
with God. ‘I will not let Thee go,’ he said to the 
angel that wrestled with him, ‘except Thou bless 
me!’ The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence 
and the violent take it by storm. That was the 
secret of Charles Finney’s triumph. 

His intensity was the intensity of a great fervor. 
He was borne down, as he himself puts it, with the 
weight of immortal souls; and he preached with all 
his heart in hope of saving them. “He thunders and 
lightens,’ says Dr. John Campbell, of Whitefield’s 
Tabernacle, ‘he thunders and lightens in a manner 
to shake the heart of any assembly, rousing the most 
apathetic and awing the most careless. At times his 
voice falters and his eyes become suffused with 
tears.’ He made men feel that he was in deadly 
earnest, and that the things of which he spoke were 
the only things that mattered. 


IV 


A fiery spirit was Finney’s. To the end of his 
long life he stated his case as an advocate states it; 
his logic was penetrating, pitiless, overwhelming; 
_ but it was logic on fire. He reasoned with all his 
heart; and his heart was hot. 

A fiery spirit was his; and fire burns! It con- 
sumes, purges, devours. Whenever Finney preached, 





C. G. Finney’s Text 173 


evil shrivelled up, withered, or slunk away in 
shame. After Finney visited a town, people were | 
busy for days in restoring treasure to which they 
were not entitled. One man sent another a cheque 
for fifteen hundred pounds. ‘If, he wrote, ‘it is 
tight for a man to love his neighbor as himself, it 
was wrong for me to pocket this.’ Another sent 
three hundred pounds. ‘The transaction by which 
I acquired it was not quite honest,’ he said. ‘I have 
been examining the records of our criminal courts,’ 
wrote a Rochester attorney to Mr. Finney, ‘and 1 
find that, whereas our city has increased threefold 
since your visit, there are not one-third as many 
prosecutions as there had been up to that time.’ 
And so, as Whittier would say: 


. .. the flood of emotion, deep and strong, 
Troubled the land as it swept along, 
But left a result in holier lives. 


Finney’s missions were called revivals; but they 
were ethical revivals. Wickedness wilted like a 
weed in a flame. Finney was fiery; and fire burns! 

And fire hurts! Finney’s intensity often stung. 
As I turn the pages of his autobiography, I see him 
constantly subjected to violence and persecution. 
At one place, he is molested by an angry mob; at 
another, a gang of roughs have sworn to tar and 
feather him; at a third, the police discover a plot 
that aimed at his very life. Because of his friend- 
ship with Lloyd Garrison, the pioneer abolitionist, 


174 A Casket of Cameos 


and of his sympathy with the cause of the slaves, 
his church was burned to the ground, the firemen 
refusing to extinguish the flames. He preached 
with all his heart; he was fiery; and fire huris! 

And fire spreads! [am arrested by an interesting 
coincidence. When Mr. Moody paid his first visit 
to England, Dr. Dale attended the meetings to 
ascertain, if he could, the secret of the evangelist’s 
extraordinary power. ‘His preaching,’ wrote Dr. 
Dale, in recording his experience, ‘his preaching had 
all the effect of Luther’s; he exulted in the free 
grace of God. His joy was contagious. Men leaped 
out of darkness into light and lived a Christian 
life for ever afterwards.’ Now, singularly, enough, 
Dr. Dale’s predecessor at Carr’s Lane—John Angell 
James—submitted Mr. Moody’s  predecessor— 
Charles G. Finney—to an identically similar inves- 
tigation. And he came to an identically similar 
conclusion. The enormous crowds; the profound 
impression; the spiritual awakening; the ethical 
reformation; it was the contagion of the preacher’s 
joy! Finney was fiery; and fire spreads! 


V 


As a young man, Finney walked out of his office 
declaring that he had received a retainer from the 
Lord Jesus Christ to plead His cause. He gained 
his verdict in the hearts of two great nations. His 
converts were countless. Dr. Charles Bush says that, 
in one year, the Churches of Rochester Presbytery 





C. G. Finney’s Text 175 


_ welcomed more than twelve hundred new members 
as a result of his ministry. His books were read 
with avidity at every fireside in England and 
America. As Professor of Pastoral Theology at 
Oberlin College, he impressed his character upon 
all his students and infected them with his intense 
and ardent spirit. 

He worked with all lis heart to the very, very 
end. He was eighty-three. He still stood erect; 
his fine figure inspired universal reverence; and his 
life abounded in noble and gracious ministries. On 
a beautiful Sunday evening in the summer of 1875, 
he did not go to church. But, at sunset, he walked 
with his wife to the gate to hear the music wafted 
towards them from the open windows of the sanc- 
tuary. And then he went to bed—and to sleep. He 
awoke in the presence of his Lord. He had sought 
Him and found Him, for he had searched with all 
his heart. 


XV 
ROSALIE MOYVGIOS: bs 


I 


As the lumbering old caravan crawled along the 
country road that lovely Sunday evening, the bells 
of the village church filled the balmy air with their 
sweetest music. 

‘Can’t you hear the bells nicely now, Mammie?’ 
said Rosalie. 

‘Yes,’ said the poor woman, ‘they sound just like 
the bells of our little church at home. I could almost 
cry when I hear them.’ 

On a broad open space close to the church, the 
caravan came to a halt. The bells ceased, and the 
sound of singing proceeded from the open doors. 
The service had begun. 

‘Mammie, dear,’ said Rosalie, ‘may I go and peep 
in at the church?’ 

Permission being granted, she hurried away. She 
peeped in, and she crept in. She had never been at 
a church service before. 

“Where have you been all this time, Rosalie?’ 
asked the anxious woman when at last the child 
returned. 

Rosalie told of all that she had heard and seen. 

176 


Rosalie Joyce’s Text 177 


‘And he kept on saying your text, Mammie,’ she 
said, ‘the text on your picture there: The Son of 
Man 1s come to seek and to save that which was 
lost 

The text on the picture! Yes, there it was! One 
wet Sunday afternoon, some time previously, a little 
old man with a rosy, good-tempered face had waded 
through a sea of mud from caravan to caravan dis- 
tributing pictures among the travelling people of the 
shows. To Rosalie and her mother he gave a picture 
of the Good Shepherd carrying home his lost sheep. 
He helped them to hang it up on the wooden wall of 
their wandering home. 

“There, ma’am,’ he said, as he took his leave, ‘you 
can look at that and think that the Good Shepherd 
is seeking you. He wants to find you, and take you 
up in His arms, and carry you home! And He 
won’t mind the wounds it costs Him if you'll only let 
Him do it? 

Rosalie often wondered what it all meant. She 
read to herself the words under the picture again 
and again. And now, on her very first visit to a 
church, the minister had taken them for his text. 

‘The Son of Man is come!’ 

‘The Son of Man ts come to seek and to save! 

‘The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that 
which was lost!’ 


1h 


It may be fancy, but, as I recall this incident from 


178 A Casket of Cameos 


A Peep Behind the Scenes, it seems to me that Rosa- 
lie’s text stands inseparably associated with village 
greens. It was on a village green that the text was 
brought to the caravan; it was beside a village green 
that Rosalie heard the minister explain it. I once, 
as a little boy, heard Mr. Moody preaching on a 
village green, and his text that afternoon was 
Rosalie’s text. Moreover, Mrs. Walton’s book re- 
minds me of George Eliot’s. It was on a village 
green that Dinah Morris—in Adam Bede—preached 
her famous sermon. And her text, too, was 
Rosalie’s text: ‘The Son of Man is come to seek 
and to save that which was lost.’ 

‘“TLost!” cried Dinah, “lost!’ And there was a 
great change in her voice and manner. She made a 
long pause, and the pause seemed to be filled by 
agitating thoughts that showed themselves in her 
features. At last it seemed as if, in her yearning 
desire to reclaim the lost sheep, she could not be 
satisfied by addressing her hearers as a body. She 
appealed first to one and then to another, beseeching 
them with tears to turn to God while there was 
yet time, painting to them the desolation of their 
souls, lost in sin, feeding on the husks of this miser- 
able world, far away from God their Father; and 
then the love of the Saviour who was waiting and 
watching for them!’ 

‘Lost!’ said the picture in the caravan. 

‘Lost!’ said the minister in the church. 

‘Lost!’ cried Mr. Moody that Sunday afternoon. 


Rosalie Joyce’s Text 179 


‘Lost!’ exclaimed Dinah Morris on the Hayslope 
Green. 

‘The Son of Manis come to seek and to save that 
which was lost! 


me 


‘The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that 
which was lost? 

It is a string of monosyllables! The words are 
so simple that they awaken the soul of poor little 
Rosalie, catch the attention of the villagers loung- 
ing on the green, and enshrine themselves in the 
hearts of little children as they cluster round their 
mother’s knee. And yet it is not so much with the 
simplicity of the passage as with its sublimity that 
I am impressed just now. We speak of the ‘simple 
gospel’ as though it had no heights unscaleable, no 
depths unfathomable, no lengths and breadths which 
human minds cannot discover and explore. We 
speak of the simplicity of such words as ‘Jesus died 
for me,’ and we forget that eternal mysteries lie 
hid, in every syllable of such a phrase, which angels 
cannot hymn nor archangels explain. 

Jesus came—and died for me! 
Simple words; and yet expressing 


Depths of holy mystery, 
Depths of wondrous love and blessing. 


When the saintly John Fletcher of Madeley lay dy- 
ing of a malady which he had contracted by unre- 
mitting attendance upon his fever-stricken people, 


180 A Casket of Cameos 


he called upon his wife and maid servant to sing and 
shout of the vastness and splendor of the love of 
God. ‘God is love!’ he cried; ‘sing of it, shout of 
it, both of you!’ His wife quoted to him one of 
John Wesley’s noblest translations. She knew how 
he loved the lines: 


Mercy’s full power I soon shall prove, 
Loved with an everlasting love. 


When, in the course of that bedside recital, she 
repeated the words: 


While Jesus’ blood through earth and skies, 
Mercy—free, boundless mercy cries! 


he caught at the thought that was most upon his 
heart; and, a little later, raising his hand and ex- 
claiming ‘Boundless, boundless, BOUNDLESS! 
died. It is just that element of boundlessness that 
arrests me as [ gaze with Rosalie upon the picture 
in the caravan and listen with her to the sermon in 
the village church. 


IV 


For who can stand before Rosalie’s picture and 
contemplate Rosalie’s text without being profoundly 
impressed by the boundlessness of the Saviour’s 
Personality? ‘The Son of Man! The title is full 
of suggestiveness. It is grand, dignified, sublime. 
He was a son of a man; but He was more. He was 
the son of a man; but He was more. He was a son 


Rosalie Joyce’s Text 181 


of Man; but He was more. He was the Son of 
Man. What did it mean? 

He stood, as Carlyle would say, in the centre of 
immensities, in the conflux of eternities; and, look- 
ing backwards, He saw what we rightly call the 
Fall of Man. And He remembered the words of 
promise and of hope that He Himself had spoken 
amid the sorrows of a sin-stricken Eden. Man as 
man had fallen, and to Man He had uttered that 
great word that the seed of the woman should bruise 
the serpent’s head. And, ever since, Man had been 
looking with grief upon the long procession of its 
sons, but with eager expectancy for its Son—that 
sinless Son of a sinful race who was to bring de- 
liverance, redemption and triumph over the coils of 
the serpent. 

And at last, a voice is heard, saying, ‘The Son of 
Man is come!’ And the world only failed to re- 
joice because it failed to see in that mystic title the 
greatness and the glory of its high significance. 
Christ was the Son of the Race. And the Race 
may well rejoice over her Son with joy unspeak- 
able and full of glory. Christ was the Son of no 
empire, nation, kindred or tribe. The art galleries 
of the nations prove, with striking vividness, that 
each people has claimed Him as its own. And they 
have claimed Him rightly. The wide world was 
His Mother Country; Heaven itself His Fatherland ; 
and the Race does well to hold its single Son in 
reverence and in love. 


182 A Casket of Cameos 


Some called Him the Son of Abraham: and it 
was true; but He was more. Some called Him the 
Son of David; and it was true; but He was more. 
Some called Him the Son of Mary; and it was 
true; but He was more. Those who called Him the 
Son of Abraham imposed upon Him a racial limi- 
tation; those who called Him the Son of David im- 
posed upon Him a kingly limitation; those who 
called Him the Son of Mary imposed upon Him a 
domestic limitation. He shook Himself free from 
them all and cried: ‘The Son of Man 1s come! 
Herein is boundlessness! Like His love, He ‘pass- 
eth knowledge,’ and, like the peace of God, He 
‘passeth all understanding.’ ‘Can you understand 
Jesus Christ?’ someone asked of Daniel Webster 
one day, when the great statesman was surrounded 
- by a group of literary acquaintances. ‘No!’ he re- 
plied, ‘I would be ashamed to acknowledge Him 
as my Saviour if I could understand Him. I need 
a superhuman Saviour—one so great and glorious 
that I cannot comprehend Him!’ 


V 


And who can stand before Rosalie’s picture and 
contemplate Rosalie’s text without being amazed 
at the boundlessness of the Saviour’s Constituency? 
‘That which is lost? It seemed an awful task, even 
to His disciples as He said it, but let the fancy 
contrast His vision with theirs. They saw a little 
world lapped from end to end by the blue waters 


Rosalie Joyce’s Text 183 


of the Mediterranean. But He saw hosts of men, 
tier above tier, clime beyond clime, nations and em- 
pires and continents all unsuspected and unknown, 
generation above generation, century beyond cen- 
tury, age after age! 

‘That which is lost’ His constituency was sub- 
ject to no bounds or limitations. He knew no masses 
and no classes, no old and no young, no high and 
no low, no rich and no poor. Wherever in the wide, 
wide world ‘that which is lost’ existed, the Son of 
Man came to seek and to save it. He came to save 
the lost monarch, with his glittering diadem and 
ermine robes, lost in his fatal pride and independence. 
He came to save the lost ne’er-do-well, tramping 
aimlessly, hopelessly, grimly, doggedly, through 
tussock and scrub, over our silent inland hills—lost 
in carelessness and despair. He came to save the 
lost son in his midnight carousals and debauchery ; 
He came to save the lost daughter, shuddering in her 
dreadful humiliation and shame. He came to save 
the lost loiterer lounging at the corners of our city 
streets; the lost sailor on the wild high seas; the 
lost scholar dazed amid the splendid problems of 
his theories and philosophies; the lost Pharisee, 
who, faultily faultless and icily regular, is too far 
lost to know that he is lost; and He came to save 
the lost ordinary man—lost you, lost me! 

He came to save the lost. They may be lost 
sadly and strikingly, like the younger and favorite 
of two sons—a loss that constitutes a great and 


184 A Casket of Cameos 


aching void which nothing else can fill. They may 
be lost less noticeably, less painfully, like one piece 
of silver out of ten. Or they may be lost like one 
sheep out of a hundred, which none but One would 
ever miss. No matter who, no matter how, no 
matter when, no matter where; ‘that which ts lost’ is 
His special care and charge. It is His boundless 
constituency. 

I really think that the best exposition of Rosalie’s 
text is Rosalie’s own. Rosalie was indulging one 
day in a confidential chat with a boy named Jinx 
from another caravan. The conversation naturally 
turned to the picture. 

“You see, Jinx,’ said the wise little Rosalie, ‘there 
are only three kinds of sheep—the ninety and nine 
who never went astray; the sheep that the Shepherd 
has found and is bringing back on His shoulders; 
and the sheep that are lost.’ 

‘Is that all the kinds?’ asked poor Jinx. 

“Yes; why?’ 

‘Well,’ replied Jinx, ‘you see I can’t be one of the 
ninety and nine, because I’ve done lots of bad things 
in my life. I’ve got into tempers, and I’ve sworn, 
and [I’ve done heaps of wicked things; so that’s out 
of the question. And I can’t be a found sheep, be- 
cause I don’t love the Good Shepherd—I never think 
about Him at all; so I must be a lost sheep. That’s 
a dreadful thing to be, isn’t it?’ 

“Yes, very bad,’ said Rosalie, sympathetically ; 
and then, with a sudden flash of illumination, ‘but 


Rosalie Joyce’s Text 185 


if you're a lost sheep, you're the very sheep that 
Jesus came to save, for “the Son of Man is come to 
seek and to save that which was lost!’ 

I do not know what the minister said about the 
text that night in the village church; but I am sure 
that he said nothing better than that. 


Vi 

And who can stand before Rosalie’s picture and 
contemplate Rosalie’s text without being lost in 
admiration at the boundlessness of the Saviour’s 
Programme? ‘To seek and to save! The accent of 
certainty that rings through the words is as melo- 
dious as the bells that Rosalie heard that Sunday 
evening. He came, not to seek to save, but to seek 
and to save. He came, not to attempt, but to do; 
not to try, but to triumph! 

That was always the occupation of Jesus—always 
seeking the lost. You will find the world’s heroes 
where the banquets are the gayest, where the flowers 
are the fairest, where the plaudits ring the loudest, 
where the songs rise the sweetest, where music 
swells the most voluptuously. You will find Jesus 
by the well with a guilty woman; you will find Him 
at the gates of Nain with a widow doubly crushed; 
you will find Him at the tomb with two weeping 
sisters; you will find Him alone with a maiden 
wrapped in the icy slumber of death; you will find 
Him where passion sweeps the fiercest, where the 
anguish is the keenest, where the heartbreak is the 


186 A Casket of Cameos 


saddest, where the loss is the heaviest, where the 
tears are the bitterest, for the Son of Man is come 
to seek and to save that which was lost. 

He is always seeking. That is what Francis 
Thompson, with such rare insight and such real 
felicity, has sought to convey to us in his Hound 
of Heaven. 


I fled Him down the nights and down the days; 
I fled Him down the arches of the years; 
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways 
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears 
I hid from Him, and under running laughter 
Up vistaed hopes, I sped; 
And shot, precipitated 
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, 
From these strong Feet that followed, followed after, 
But with unhurrying chase 
And unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
They beat—and a Voice beat 
More instant than the Feet— 
‘Lo, all things fly thee as thou fliest Me.’ 


As long as we evade Him, all real happiness evades 
us. 

For, seeking, He comes to save. And here He 
stands absolutely alone, solitary, unique. Herein 
His ministry ineffably supersedes and transcends all 
the ministries of men. Supposing all others who are 
seeking to save humanity with well-contrived 
schemes of social salvation ever reach their goal; 
supposing philanthropy, altruism and socialism ever 


Rosalie Joyce’s Text 187 


banish from the earth the hideous forms of squalor, 
poverty, want, and even drink and vice; supposing 
at last every home is prettily and comfortably 
housed, environed by a smiling world—what then? 
If the hearts within those fair homes are still Christ- 
less, still unregenerate, you have only driven their 
misery further in. You have healed the skin over 
the wound whilst the flesh is yet unclean. You 
have painted and varnished rotten wood. For such 
a hollow parody on salvation the world will not 
long thank you, but, in the first hungry pangs of 
its disappointment and remorse, will turn again 
and rend you. 


Give the winds a mighty voice, 
Jesus saves, Jesus saves! 
Let all nations now rejoice, 
Jesus saves, Jesus saves! 
Shout salvation full and free 
To every strand that ocean laves, 
This our song of victory— 
Jesus SAVES, Jesus SAVES! 


Vil 


‘Mammie, dear,’ said Rosalie, one day, ‘shall we 
tell Him?’ 

“Tell Him what, my dear?’ 

‘Just tell Him that you and me want seeking and 
finding!’ 

‘I don’t know, Rosalie; you can try! 

‘Please, Good Shepherd,’ prayed Rosalie, ‘come 


188 A Casket of Cameos 


and seek me and Mammie, and find us very quick 
and carry us very safe—like the lamb in the picture!’ 

I do not know what petitions the minister offered 
in the village church that Sunday night; but I am 
sure he offered no prayer more acceptable to heaven 
than that! 


XVI 
JOHN WILLIAMS’ TEXT 


[ 


THE boys who were born in the closing years of the 
eighteenth century were swept off their feet by the 
audacious exploits of Captain Cook. That intrepid 
navigator had fired their fancies with the vision of a 
new world. His adventurous voyages, his sensa- 
tional discoveries and his tragic death were the talk 
of the time. In every playground in England, 
schoolboys were dreaming feverish day-dreams of 
coral reefs and cannibal islands away in southern 
seas. William Carey was one of those boys; John 
Williams was another. ‘If I had the means,’ said 
Carey, ‘I would go to the South Seas and commence 
a mission at Otaheiti.’ He changed his mind, how- 
ever, and went to India, leaving to John Williams 
that vast expanse of sea and land that Captain Cook 
had so recently explored. 

John Williams was just the man for the moment; 
he seemed to have been built on purpose. Sailing in 
the wake of our greatest navigator, he caught so 
perfectly the spirit of his illustrious predecessor 
that he was able to continue and complete his work. 
He discovered Raratonga, an island that had eluded 
the sharp eyes and tireless researches of Captain 

189 


190 A Casket of Cameos 


Cook and his companions. In boats that he himself 
had built, he sailed ‘from island unto island at the 
gateways of the day.’ As soon as he had established 
a footing on one group, he pushed on to another. 
When the authorities in England questioned his wis- 
dom in roving like a viking round the Pacific, he 
told them frankly that no other programme would 
appease his conscience. ‘A missionary,’ he wrote, 
‘was never designed by Jesus Christ to gather a con- 
gregation of a hundred or two natives, and sit down 
at his ease, as contented as if every sinner were con- 
verted, while thousands around him, and but a few 
miles off, are eating each other’s flesh and drinking 
each other’s blood, living and dying without the 
gospel. For my own part, / cannot content myself 
within the narrow limits of a single reef. If, he 
said, the committee discountenanced his ship-build- 
ing and denied him further facilities for navigation, 
he would a thousand times rather be stationed on 
a continent, “for there, if you cannot ride, you can 
walk; but to these scattered islands only a ship can 
carry you.’ He was always looking for new worlds 
to conquer. And he conquered them. Take Rara- 
tonga for example. He discovered it in 1823 and 
commenced evangelistic activities at once. He planted 
several mission stations, committing them to the care 
of his native workers. Therein, his son thinks, lay 
the genius of his statesmanship; he knew how to 
make missionaries of his converts. Five years later, 
he had two of his fellow-countrymen in residence 


John Williams’ Text 19I 


on the island superintending all the operations there. 
Six years later still, he is able to report that Rara- 
tonga has been completely evangelized; its idols have 
all been destroyed by their former worshippers; 
three spacious and substantial churches have been 
erected; the people have the Word of God in their 
own language, and, he adds, ‘I am not aware that 
there is a house in the island where family worship 
is not observed every morning and every evening.’ 
He is delighted at the way in which civilization and 
commerce have followed in the train of Christianity ; 
and, on almost the last day of his life, he com- 
pleted arrangements for the establishment on the 
island of a college in which suitable young men 
were to be thoroughly educated, and taught the 
useful arts, with a view to their becoming the leaders 
and instructors of their own people. He was, as 
Dr. Campbell finely said, ‘a man who has achieved 
for himself a deathless fame, and one concerning 
whom generations to come will feel a laudable and 
reverent curiosity.’ 


I] 


It was on the first Sunday of the New Year that 
Mr. Spurgeon was suddenly arrested by the power 
of the gospel. It was on the first Sunday of the 
New Year that, no less startlingly, John Williams 
was enlisted in the Saviour’s service. And in each 
case it was a text that did it. Mr. Spurgeon liked 
to tell the story of John Williams’ conversion, be- 


192 A Casket of Cameos 


cause, in some respects, it so closely resembled his 
own. It was ona sharp, frosty evening—the even- 
ing of Sunday, January 3, 1819. Soon after dusk, 
a cold sleet had fallen; but the weather had cleared, 
and throngs of people, hurrying this way and that, 
were responding to the melodious invitation of the 
bells. On her way to church, Mrs. Tonkin, in 
passing along City Road, was struck by the appear- 
ance of a tall young fellow who seemed to be 
lounging aimlessly at the street corner. He was 
a lad of about eighteen, stalwart and sinewy, already 
giving promise of vast physical energy. As the 
lamplight fell upon his fine open countenance, she 
turned and fastened upon him a second and more 
penetrating glance. Something about him seemed 
familiar; where had she seen that face before? To 
be sure! he was one of her husband’s apprentices; 
she remembered noticing him in the workshop. She 
paused, and then went back to him. He explained 
that he had made an appointment with some friends 
to meet at this corner and to spend the evening at a 
tavern at Highbury. His companions, however, had 
failed to put in an appearance; and he was feeling 
vexed and disappointed. ‘My course of life at this 
period,’ he wrote afterwards, ‘was very wicked 
though not flagrantly immoral. I was regardless of 
the Sabbath; a lover of pleasure more than a lover 
of God; I often scoffed at the name of Christ and 
His religion; and I totally neglected those things 
which alone can afford solid consolation.’ Mrs. 


John Williams’ Text 193 


Tonkin urged him to accompany her to Moorfields 
Tabernacle. With a little persuasion, he consented. 

Twenty-four years afterwards, on the occasion of 
his visit to England, he stood in the pulpit of that 
very building and told a crowded congregation of 
that youthful yet momentous experience of his. ‘I 
have in my view at the present moment,’ he said, ‘the 
door by which I entered; I have all the circum- 
stances of that important era in my history vividly 
impressed upon my mind; I have in my eye at this 
instant the particular spot on which I took my seat. 
I have also a distinct impression of the powerful 
sermon that was that evening preached by the ex- 
cellent Mr. East. That good man took for his text 
that night one of the most impressive questions of 
inspired writ: What shall it profit a man tf he 
shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? 
God was pleased in His own gracious providence 
to influence my mind so powerfully that I forsook 
all my worldly companions and became a teacher in 
the Sabbath-school connected with this place. Many 
a Sabbath afterwards did I sit upon the form now 
in my sight with my class, and impart that knowl- — 
edge to them which God in His gracious goodness 
had given to me.’ 

It was thus that the supreme issues of human life 
—the world and the soul—/us world and Jus soul— 
were suddenly presented for his contemplation. 

The world: his world! 

The soul: his soul! 


194 A Casket of Cameos 


To gain the world: to lose his soul! 

What shall it profit a man tf he shall gain the 
whole world and lose his own soul? 

John Williams resolved that Sunday night that his 
immortal soul should on no account be lost; and he 
resolved to win a larger world than the paltry world 
on which, up to that moment, his heart had been set. 


Til 


I do not know—lI should like to know—how Mr. 
East dealt that evening with this old, old question. 
It must have been in some new and striking way. 
Perhaps he took it to pieces. It sometimes happens 
that you get so used to a thing as a whole that you 
only realize the wonder of its composition when its 
component parts are all spread out before you. A 
gun, a clock, a microscope looks commonplace; but, 
let a skilful mechanic take it to pieces before your 
eyes, and you stand astonished at its delicate settings 
and beautiful adjustments. It may be that Mr. 
East did something of the kind that night. He may 
have talked for awhile on the wisdom of weighing _ 
the issues of life and of computing its profit—or 
loss. He may have discussed the unutterable value 
of the individual soul. He may have commented 
eloquently on the conquest of the world. I have 
sometimes fancied that a sermon could be preached 
on that fragment alone. To say nothing of the loss 
of the soul, what shall tt profit a man tf he shall gain 
the whole world? 


John Williams’ Text 195 


It all depends. A man might gain an inconsider- 
able fraction of the world and be immensely profited, 
or, on the other hand, he might gain the whole world 
without being profited at all. As I say, it all de- 
pends. And it depends, not upon the world, but 
upon himself. Everybody knows the Eastern story 
of the man who, becoming extremely rich, built for 
himself a magnificent palace. He lived in it with 
perfect satisfaction until somebody told him that no 
palace was complete unless a roc’s egg hung sus- 
pended from its roof. The unhappy man thereupon 
set out to find a roc’s egg, and, always unsuccessful 
in his search, died in his mortification and discon- 
tent. Marshal Soult and the Duke of Wellington 
were one day inspecting Canova’s statue of Napo- 
leon, a statue which represents the emperor as the 
conqueror of the world. The globe is in his hand. 
Turning to the Duke, Soult remarked that it was 
very odd that a sculptor who understood so per- 
fectly the science of proportion should have made 
the globe so extremely small. ‘Ah,’ replied the 
Duke, ‘but England was not init! It was the story 
of the roc’s egg over again. Our capacity for satis- 
faction depends, not on the splendor of our con- 
quests, but on ourselves. A man may win the whole 
world, and, so far from being profited, may simply 
weep that there are no more worlds to conquer.. 


IV 


If he gain the whole world! 


196 A Casket of Cameos 


If he lose his own soul! 

The whole world! His own soul! 

Neither is a negligible quantity. The man who 
lives for the whole world and neglects his own soul 
is a Materialist; the man who lives for his own soul 
and neglects the whole world is a Monk; and neither 
the Materialist nor the Monk represents the ideal of 
perfect manhood. 

To gam the whole world! A recent work of fic- 
tion tells us that, on the Corniche road, near to the 
little village of Eze, where the splash of the Mediter- 
ranean waves is the only sound heard, you may see 
an old tombstone with this strange inscription: 
“Here lies the soul of Count Louis Esterfield.’” Many 
travellers had passed by during long years and read 
it and wondered, repeating the words with puzzled 
minds. Some laughed lightly, and others looked 
grave, until at last came a man who having read 
the epitaph, sat down beside the stone to ponder it. 
After a while, he began to dig, and, working pa- 
tiently for some time, he came upon a box made of 
metal, and filled with jewels and gold. Among 
them lay a paper on which was written: ‘You are 
my heir; to you I bequeath this wealth, for you 
alone have understood me. In this box is my soul!’ 
An identically similar story occurs in the introduc- 
tion to Gil Blas. In each case there is the sad, 
despairing cry of a man who has gained his whole 
world and lost jis own soul. It is the misery of 
the Materialist. 


John Williams’ Text 107 


And the misery of the Monk is scarcely less piti- 
ful. In his concern for his own soul he turns back 
upon the whole world. Luther did. ‘I was indeed 
a pious monk,’ he writes to Duke George of Saxony, 
‘and followed the rules of my order more strictly 
than I can express. If ever monk could obtain 
heaven by his monkish works, I should certainly 
have been entitled to it. Of this all the friars who 
have known me can testify. If it had continued 
much longer, I should have carried my mortifica- 
tion even to death, by means of my vigils, prayers, 
readings and other cloistral labors.’ Happily, 
Luther remembers the world—the whole world— 
the world that God so loved—the world for which 
Christ died. And, remembering the whole world, 
he set out from his convent cell to win it; and he 
won it in a way that made his soul more than ever 
his own. 


V 


So did John Williams. For, that New Year’s 
Sunday evening at Moorfields Tabernacle, he sud- 
denly acquired a new view of the value of his own 
soul and a new view of the value of the whole world. 
The value of his soul impressed him immediately ; 
the value of the world impressed him no less pro- 
foundly. 

The whole world! 

God so loved the world! 

Go ye into all the world! 


198 A Casket of Cameos 


The visions that had fired his fancy as he pored 
over the stirring pages of Captain Cook rushed back 
upon his mind. ‘If I had the means,’ said William 
Carey, as he read Cook’s Voyages, ‘if 1 had the 
means, I would go to the South Seas and commence 
a mission at Otaheiti.’ Carey went to India; but 
Williams went to Otaheiti. And, stranded there, 
he felt his utter helplessness. The world—even 
Cook’s world—seemed wonderfully wide. ‘If,’ he 
wrote to a friend, ‘if only I had a ship, I would visit 
every island in the Pacific and leave teachers on 
each one to direct the feet of the heathen to happi- 
ness and heaven.’ At last he could endure his 
world-hunger no longer. Totally ignorant of the 
arts of ship-building, and entirely destitute of the 
necessary tools, he actually built a ship—the Mes- 
senger of Peace—a little vessel of seventy tons 
burthen. It was, as somebody said, the evidence 
no less of his fervid piety than of his matchless skill. 
The committee in England censured him for doing 
it; but he could not help it. ‘The first sermon I 
ever preached in the native language,’ he says, ‘was 
from the text: This is a faithful saying, and worthy 
of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the 
world to save sinners. I love that doctrine; and I 
am resolved never to preach a sermon in any lan- 
guage unless salvation through the blood of Christ 
is its sum and substance. It is a truth worth carry- 
ing to the whole world!’ 

The whole world! 


John Williams’ Text 199 


God so loved the world! 

Go ye into all the world! 

Ais own soul! The whole world! 

He won them both! In November, 1839, he 
sailed for Erromanga, an island that he had never 
visited before. ‘The approaching week, he wrote 
in his diary, ‘ts to me the most important of my life, 
It was. The last entry in that journal reads: ‘The 
results of this day will be— The sentence was 
never finished. For, that day, the natives of Erro- 
manga slew him with their clubs. He was only 
forty-three. But he had held true to the great de- 
cision that he made at Moorfields Tabernacle as a 
boy. His soul was all his own; and he had bravely 
done his part towards the winning of the whole 
wide world. 


XVII 
W. M. THACKERAY’S TEXT 


I 


‘THAT text is worth a million pounds! exclaimed 
Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield. Thackeray thought 
so too. He never actually put a price upon it, but 
he made it perfectly clear that he regarded it as in- 
valuable. Every reader of The Newcomes knows 
Thackeray’s text. Colonel Newcome is Thackeray’s 
dream-man, his vision splendid, his beckoning ideal. 
It is because Thackeray took such pains to weave 
into the character of Thomas Newcome the sim- 
plicities and sublimities of his own faith that the 
Colonel has taken his place as the Grand Old Man 
of English fiction. He is, as somebody has said, 
the typical gentleman, perfect in all points and parts; 
never once insipid or dull; and, as we watch him 
grow old, we feel for him the affectionate solicitude 
that we cherish for a dear relation or an honored 
friend. He never seems more noble than when he 
stands, unconquered, amidst the calamities that over- 
whelm him at the last. In age and feebleness he 
is doomed to witness the shipwreck of his fortunes. 
Night falls upon him, not serene and starlit, but 
with black storm and raging tempest. Yet, in the 


200 


W. M. Thackeray’s Text 201 


darkest hour that ever closes round him, he stands, 
with spirit unbroken and faith unruffled, resting 
serenely in the shelter of a psalm. 

In his poverty—a poverty in which there is no 
tinge of shame—he sits among the black-coated pen- 
sioners of the Hospital of Grey Friars. But with 
grateful heart and shining face he sets his seal to 
the testimony that he reads in the book that lies 
open on his knee. The steps of a good man are 
ordered by the Lord: Though he fall, he shall not 
be utierly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him 
with His hand. I have been young and now am 
old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor 
his seed begging bread. ‘His dear old head,’ says 
Arthur Pendennis, who, horrified at seeing him 
there, speedily effected his deliverance, ‘his dear old 
head was bent down over the book, but there was 
no mistaking him. He wore the black gown of the 
pensioners; but his Order of the Bath was on his 
breast.’ It seemed to Arthur an irony that the 
steps of this good man had been ordered of the 
Lord—to an almshouse! Impatient to reach his old 
friend, he at length succeeded in doing so. He 
found him in a little room which, though severely 
plain, was neat and comfortable; and, on the table, 
which was laid for tea, was the old man’s Bible, with 
his spectacles beside it. 

‘Don’t be agitated, Arthur, my boy,’ exclaimed 
the old man soothingly. “I am very happy. I have 
good quarters, good food, good light, good fire and 


202 A Casket of Cameos 


good friends. Blessed be God, my dear, kind young 
friend, I am as happy as the day is long!’ 

Arthur thought, he tells us, of the Psalm that he 
had heard the old man singing. I have been young 
and now am old, yet have I not seen the righteous 
forsaken nor lus seed begging bread. He stepped 
to the table and turned the pages of the old man’s 
Bible till he found it. The Colonel rose, laid a kind, 
trembling hand upon Arthur’s shoulder, and, with a 
smile, bent over the volume. And who, Arthur 
asks, could behold that smile without adoring the 
grace that had achieved so notable and beautiful a 
triumph ? 

It 

But, in admiring Colonel Newcome, we must not 
lose sight of Thackeray. We are too prone 
to extol the creation and forget the creator. In 
giving us this heroic and impressive picture of 
Colonel Newcome, Thackeray was simply painting 
a wonderfully revealing portrait of his own soul. 
At least, he was painting a portrait of his own soul 
as he would have liked his soul to be. You may 
judge a man by his ideals; and Colonel Newcome 
is Thackeray’s. Thackeray brought Colonel New- 
come into existence that, at his feet, we might all 
learn to be trustful and brave. ‘I like to think,’ 
the novelist once said, ‘that my books have been 
written by a God-loving man. Their morality— 
the vanity of everything but love and goodness— 


W. M. Thackeray’s Text 203 


is but a reflection of the teaching of our Lord.’ 
When Thackeray knew that his end was near, he 
was visited by an intimate friend—Mr. Synge—who 
was leaving England for some years. 

‘I want to tell you,’ said Thackeray, ‘that I shall 
never see you again. I feel that I am doomed. I 
know that this will grieve you; but look in that 
book, and you will find something that, I am sure, 
will please and comfort you.’ 

The ‘something’ was a written prayer in which 
he prayed that he might never write a word incon- 
sistent with the love of God or the love of man; 
that he might never propagate his own prejudices 
or pander to those of others; that he might always 
speak the truth with his pen, and that he might 
never be actuated by love of greed. ‘And I par- 
ticularly remember,’ Mr. Synge tells us, “that the 
prayer wound up with the words: For the sake of 
Jesus Christ our Lord.’ It was in the spirit of that 
prayer, and in answer to it, that Colonel New- 
come’s name appeared upon the pages of English 
literature. 

It is eminently characteristic of Thackeray that 
it is from the Bible that, in the day of his calamity, 
old Colonel Newcome derives courage and hope. In 
all Thackeray’s books that principle holds true. 
Whenever any of the characters find themselves 
faced by some stupendous crisis—a crisis of tem- 
poral disaster or a crisis of spiritual despair—it is 
invariably from the inspired pages of Scripture that 


204 A Casket of Cameos 


there comes the word of pardon or direction or 
cheer. ‘It would be easy,’ as Sir Alfred Dale, the 
late Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University, has finely 
said, ‘it would be easy to find a score of passages 
in which Thackeray caught his inspiration from 
gospel or from psalm. But there is one passage in 
which he reveals himself unconsciously; and un- 
conscious revelations are the surest. You remem- 
ber the story of George Warrington in Pendenms 
—-the young man who has made shipwreck, and has 
to atone for a single act of folly by a life without 
ambition, without love, and almost without hope. 
He is left to face it all alone, alone with the flowers 
that recall the vision of joy that has come and 
passed him by, and with the Bible that a grateful 
mother has left as a parting gift; the fading flowers 
and the unfading book; alone with them, alone with 
the night. “And,” Thackeray adds, “the morning 
found him still reading in its awful pages, in which, 
so many stricken hearts, in which so many tender 
and faithful souls have found comfort under 
calamity and refuge and hope in affliction.” ’ 

Comfort under calamity! 

Refuge and hope in affliction! 

The words sum up with perfect accuracy the situ- 
ation in which old Colonel Newcome found him- 
self when the text came to his aid at Grey Friars! 

I have been young and now am old, yet have I 


not seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging 
bread. 


W. M. Thackeray’s Text 205 


Ii! 


Now in my own copy of The Newcomes there 
is an introductory essay on Thackeray and his work. 
In the course of his critique, the writer compares 
Thackeray, first with Oliver Goldsmith and then 
with Sir Walter Scott. For my present purpose 
the comparison is extremely pertinent. For both 
Goldsmith and Scott knew the value of the words 
that so comforted the old Colonel. 

I have been young and now am old, yet have I 
not seen the righteous forsaken nor lus seed begging 
bread. 

Thackeray, because of his reverent affection for 
the words, made them Colonel Newcome’s text. 

Goldsmith, because of his reverent affection for 
the words, made them the Vicar of Wake field’s text. 

Sir Walter Scott, because of his reverent affec- 
tion for the words, made them Jeanie Deans’ text. 

Like Colonel Newcome, the Vicar of Wakefield 
has sustained the shipwreck of his fortune. ‘Out of 
fourteen thousand pounds,’ he says, “we had but 
four hundred remaining. My chief attention, there- 
fore, was to bring down the pride of my family to 
their circumstances; for I well knew that aspiring 
beggary is wretchedness itself. As my oldest son 
was bred a scholar, I determined to send him to 
town, where his abilities might contribute to our 
support and his own. The separation of friends 
and families is, perhaps, one of the most distress- 


206 A Casket of Cameos 


ful circumstances attendant on penury. The day 
soon arrived on which we were to disperse for the 
first time. My son, after taking leave of his mother 
and the rest, who mingled their tears with their 
kisses, came to ask a blessing from me. This I gave 
him from my heart, for, added to five guineas, this 
was all the patrimony I had now to bestow. 

“You are going, my boy,’ cried I, ‘to London 
on foot. Take from me this staff, and take, too, 
this book; it will be your comfort on the way. These 
two lines in it are worth a million: J have been young 
and now am old, yet have I not seen the righteous 
forsaken nor his seed begging bread. Let this be 
your consolation as you travel on.’ 

I have often wondered how that paragraph found 
its way into The Vicar of Wakefield. No other 
English classic was penned under such squalid and 
degrading conditions as those which marked the pro- 
duction of Goldsmith’s masterpiece. Dr. Johnson 
has made the episode historic. ‘I received one morn- 
ing, he says, ‘a message from poor Goldsmith that 
he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his 
power to come to me, he begged that I would come 
to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea and 
promised to come to him directly. I accordingly 
went as soon as I was dressed and found that, his 
rent being sadly in arrear, his landlady had placed 
him under arrest. I asked him to be calm and 
began to talk to him of the means by which he 
might be extricated. He then told me that he had 


W. M. Thackeray’s Text 207 


a novel ready for the press which he produced. I 
looked into it and saw its merits; told the landlady 
‘I should soon return; and, having gone to the book- 
seller, sold it for sixty pounds.’ That novel was 
The Vicar of Wakefield! 

And here, embedded in that novel, is the text! 
When in his narrow attic, Goldsmith penned that 
paragraph about the text, was he recalling some 
such experience that befell himself on the day on 
which he left his father’s home? His father, like 
the Vicar of Wakefield, was a country minister in 
reduced circumstances. He himself had left home 
in much the same way as George Primrose in the 
story. « Did Oliver Goldsmith’s father send him out 
into the world with that text, telling him that it 
was ‘worth a million’? Did Goldsmith ponder it in 
his poverty? And did the text rush back upon 
his mind when Dr. Johnson returned from the book- 
seller’s with the sixty golden coins? I cannot say 
for certain; but all the circumstances of the case 
point in that direction. 

So much for Oliver Goldsmith; we must turn to 
Sir Walter Scott. And even Sir Walter Scott never 
wrote a tenderer idyll of Scottish life than that 
which we all cherish in The Heart of Midlothian. 
Jeanie Deans has made up her mind to tramp all 
the way from Edinburgh to London to plead with 
the King and Queen for the life of Effie, her sister. 
It happens that, at the moment of her projected de- 
parture, her father, old David Deans, and her lover, 


208 A Casket of Cameos 


Reuben Butler, are in circumstances of urgent neces- 
sity and distress. Effie languishes in a felon’s cell. 
It breaks her heart to leave them all in such a 
plight; yet an appeal to the King and Queen seems 
to her the only way of deliverance. Before setting 
out on her long journey she calls on her lover to say 
good-bye. She asks for some papers, and, whilst 
he is away getting them, she hurriedly marks with 
his kylevine pen a passage in his Bible. 

‘I have marked a scripture that will be useful to 
us baith,’ she told him a few moments afterwards, 
‘and ye must take the trouble, Reuben, to write out 
the words and send them to my father.’ 

What words were they? As soon as Jeanie had 
gone, Sir Walter tells us, Butler flew to the Bible— 
the last book she had touched—and pored eagerly 
over the text that she had underlined. J have been 
young and now am old, yet have I not seen the 
righteous forsaken nor lis seed begging bread. But- 
ler read the words again and again, and, as he did 
so, made it the supreme object of his ambition to 
attain to Jeanie’s devout firmness and noble con- 
fidence. 


IV 


Now I have cited these pages from the classics, 
not because of their association with Colonel New- 
come, the Vicar of Wakefield and Jeanie Deans, but 
because of their association with Thackeray, Gold- 
smith and Scott. The text must have meant some- 


W. M. Thackeray’s Text 209 


thing to Thackeray or he would never have made 
it Colonel Newcome’s text; it must have meant some- 
thing to Sir Walter Scott or he would never have 
made it Jeanie Deans’ text; it must have meant some- 
thing to Oliver Goldsmith or he would never have 
made the Vicar of Wakefield tell his son that the 
words were worth a million pounds. 

But, after all, I could easily have dispensed with 
fiction. I could have called two other witnesses. 
For everybody who. has read his Last Journals 
knows how often David Livingstone pillowed his 
fevered head on the thirty-seventh Psalm. As he 
made his way along those interminable slave-tracks, 
littered with the bones of the victims who had fallen; 
as he tossed in his delirium among the swamps and 
bogs of the watershed; as he faced death at the 
hands of hostile and infuriated savages; and as he 
endured untold agonies inflicted upon him by poison- 
ous insects, venomous reptiles and wild beasts, he 
found one ceaseless fountain of inspiration and 
comfort. He would never be forsaken! He would 
never lack bread! J have been young and now am 
old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken nor 
his seed begging bread. 

My other witness would have been a Covenanter, 
and one of the noblest of the Covenanters. Robert 
Baillie of Jerviswoode—the ‘Algernon Sydney of 
Scotland’—was the great-grandson of John Knox. 
“You have men of noble spirit in Scotland,’ wrote 
Dr. John Owen, ‘but Mr. Baillie of Jerviswoode 


210 A Casket of Cameos 


possesses the greatest abilities I ever met with.’ He 
was publicly hanged at the Market Cross of Edin- 
burgh on Christmas Eve, 1684; his body was sub- 
mitted to every indignity; and his property was con- 
fiscated and forfeited to the Crown. Before being 
led to the scaffold, he sent for his son and told him 
that the bitterest ingredient in his anguish was the 
fact that he was being compelled to leave his family 
penniless. ‘But,’ he added, ‘God’s promises are sure, 
and I am confident that the testimony of David will 
be verified: J have been young and now am old, yet 
have I not seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed 
begging bread.’ 


V 


Thackeray was a tremendous believer in the 
Fatherly love of God. He had implicit and unwav- 
ering confidence in the sheltering and protecting care 
that God is able to exercise—for the sake of Jesus 
Christ our Lord. ‘I particularly noticed,’ says Mr. 
Synge, “that he said for the sake of Jesus Christ our 
Lord’ He thought it the loveliest thing in religion 
that God allows Himself to be called Our Father— 
Our Father for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Dr. John Brown tells how, one beautiful Sunday 
evening, Thackeray went for a walk with two 
friends in one of the most charming suburbs of 
Edinburgh. The sky was a sea of glory: the hills 
lay bathed in amethystine splendor: it was such a 
sunset as one never forgets. “The north-west end 


W. M. Thackeray’s Text 20 


of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay 
in the heart of this pure radiance, and there a 
wooden crane, used in the granary below, was so 
placed as to assume the figure of a cross. There 
it was, unmistakably lifted up against the crystalline 
sky. All three gazed at it silently. Suddenly 
Thackeray gave utterance, in a gentle and tremulous 
voice, to what all were feeling. “Calvary!” he said, 
“Calvary! The friends walked on in silence and 
then turned to other things. But all that evening 
Thackeray was very gentle and serious, speaking, 
as he seldom did, of divine things—of death, of sin, 
of eternity and of salvation—expressing his simple 
faith in God and in his Saviour.’ 

The Cross! Calvary! 

Death! Sin! Salvation! LEtermty! 

The Fatherly Love of God—for the sake of Jesus 
Christ our Lord. 

I have been young and now am old, yet have I not 
seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging 
bread. 

Such a faith, Goldsmith says, is worth a million 
pounds; and certainly nobody who has once made it 
his own would dream of parting with it at that price. 


XVIII 
THE COUNTESS OF HUNTINGDON’S TEXT 


I 


Tue Countess of Huntingdon stands absolutely 
alone in history. Her extraordinary achievement is 
without precedent and without parallel; in all our 
annals there is no record that we can compare with 
hers. Since the world began, no one person of 
either sex has done for any nation what she did for 
ours. It is the unique distinction of her long and 
illustrious career that, without thrusting herself into 
prominence or compromising in the slightest degree 
the instinctive delicacy of her sex, she compelled 
every man in England, from the king upon his 
throne to the ploughman in his cottage, to give 
serious and earnest consideration to the impressive 
appeal of the everlasting gospel. By her wise, 
winsome and essentially womanly ministry, she 
brought an entire people face to face with Jesus 
Christ. Henry Venn spoke of her as a star of the 
very first magnitude; Macaulay said that, if she had 
been a Roman Catholic, she would have been canon- 
ized as Saint Selina; whilst a third authority de- 
clares deliberately that she is the greatest woman 
who has ever lived. 


212 


Countess of Huntingdon’s Text 213 


By a singular coincidence, the man who, in the 
whole course of history, did more than any other 
man for the evangelization of the English-speaking 
people, and the woman who, of all women, achieved 
most for the same end, passed away within a few 
weeks of each other. No two individual lives have 
more profoundly affected our British destinies than 
the lives of John Wesley and the Countess of Hunt- 
ingdon. They were both born when the eighteenth 
century was dawning; despite their prodigious 
labors and constant anxieties, both lived to a great 
age; and the eighteenth century was getting ready 
to die when they went down to their honored graves. 


Il 


Look at her! She is only nine; very pretty; with 
rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes and a wealthy shock of 
nut-brown hair. Notwithstanding her great posi- 
tion, her proud title and her exalted rank, she is 
perfectly natural, exquisitely girlish and entirely 
free from any suspicion of affectation. Watching 
her at her play, nobody would suspect that she is 
the heiress of a noble house that boasts its hoary 
traditions, its princely lineage and its numerous 
royal alliances. She is a favorite with her play- 
mates and companions; and all the sparkle dies out 
of a frolic when the vivacious yet thoughtful little 
Lady Selina is called to leave it. But, this evening, 
an unwonted heaviness broods over her gay young 
spirit. The sprightliness has vanished; she is singu- 


214 A Casket of Cameos 


larly quiet. She is in no mood for a romp with her 
sisters. She walks apart, and, in striking contrast 
with her usual reluctance to go to bed, she seeks, 
earlier than the appointed hour, the solitude of her 
own room. Something must have happened to 
cloud her blithe young spirit with such unaccustomed 
gloom. It has! 

She was out for a walk with her sisters this after- 
noon when they encountered something that lay 
altogether beyond the bounds of all previous experi- 
ence. They met a village funeral on its way to the 
little cemetery on the hillside. The coffin was being 
borne along the country road on the shoulders of 
four sturdy rustics. Selina’s eager mind was all 
alert on the instant. Who was it that had died? 
It was a child! Did children die? She had never 
conceived of such a possibility. And who was the 
child? Wasitaboy ora girl? It wasagirl! With 
eyes full of sad surprise the sisters stared at each 
other. And was it a big girl or a little girl? How 
old was she? She was nine! The other sisters 
looked meaningly at Selina; for Selina was nine! 
The bright, sensitive child was profoundly im- 
pressed. She insisted on their following the cortége 
at a respectful distance, and they stood near enough 
to the open grave to hear every word of the burial 
service. The first vague consciousness of mortality 
—and immortality—fastened itself upon her mind. 
She was a citizen of eternity! There was another 
world, and, sooner or later, she would be summoned 


Countess of Huntingdon’s Text 215 


to pass into it! She feels this evening that she 
would give everything—her wealth, her title, her 
prospects, her all—for some sure hope of happiness 
in that world as well as in this one. But on what 
foundation can she base such a hope? That is the 
question; and, to that question, the poor little Lady 
Selina can see no possible reply. 

She could imagine no reply and she could think of 
nobody who could help her. At the dawn of the 
eighteenth century English standards and English 
manners were at their lowest ebb. Politics had 
degenerated into an undignified squabble; society 
was as corrupt as it could very well be; music, art 
and literature were all degraded; the sports and 
pastimes of life were universally squalid and often 
obscene; even religion had become formal, sancti- 
monious and largely hypocritical. “The saint,’ says 
Addison, ‘was of a sorrowful countenance and gen- 
erally eaten up with spleen and melancholy.’ The 
parson of the period, as the Countess’s biographer 
points out, was respected for his cloth rather than 
for his qualities. He sat in the kitchen of the village 
inn, smoking tobacco and drinking ale with his pa- 
rishioners, or he played the fiddle in the taprooms of 
the countryside in the daytime and at the dances and 
merry-makings at night. He was pinched in means, 
and was glad to be invited to a meal with the but- 
lers in the servants’ hall. A higher class of clergy- 
man went fox-hunting with the neighboring gentry, 
and cut a brave figure in the social life of the period. 


216 A Casket of Cameos 


A still higher grade mingled with the wits in the 
city taverns and coffee-houses. ‘But the devout 
minister of religion was rarely to be met with; the 
earnest, eloquent, persuasive, energetic, urgent mes- 
senger of the gospel was almost unknown.’ In 
what direction, then, could the little Lady Selina 
look for an answer to her troublesome question? 
On what foundation could she base her hope of 
happiness hereafter? She called into the void; there 
was no answer; and the silence mocked her pas- 
sionate insistence. 


Ill 


It is long past midnight. The Lady Selina— 
now a graceful girl of nineteen—has just returned 
from the ball. Wearing her beautiful dress, and 
with her jewels still flashing in her hair, she has 
thrown herself on her knees beside her bed in a 
tempest of tears. Never for a moment has she for- 
gotten the tumult of concern that was aroused in 
her heart ten years ago by that mournful little 
pageant on the country road. Many and many a 
time has she stolen away to the cemetery on the hill- 
side, and kneeling beside the grave under the gnarled 
old yew—the grave of the girl who, in life, she 
never knew—she has prayed that she may yet find 
an answer to her question. 

And, although no satisfactory answer has reached 
her, although she is still in the dark as to the true 
foundation on which the hope of eternal happiness 


eS — eee 


Countess of Huntingdon’s Text 217 


must be based, she has done her very utmost to merit 
the approbation of the Most High. ‘She aspired 
after rectitude,’ her biographer tells us, ‘and was 
eager to possess every moral perfection. In all such 
matters her Ladyship outstripped the multitude in 
an uncommon degree. She was rigidly just in her 
dealings and inflexibly true to her word. She 
was a strict observer of her several duties in every 
relationship of life. Her deportment was courteous, 
her conduct was prudent, her sentiments were 
liberal, and her charity was profuse. She was a 
diligent inquirer after truth, and was a regular at- 
tendant at public worship.’ Yet, for all that, she 
is uneasy and dissatisfied. She has felt—and never 
more keenly than to-night—that none of these 
things provide a solid foundation on which to rest 
her hope of everlasting felicity. 

And, even if they could, there is another question. 
What of her sin? “My best righteousness,’ she tells 
us, “now appeared to be but filthy rags, which, so far. 
from justifying me before God, increased my con- 
demnation. I was filled with remorse, I saw that my 
heart was deceitful above all things and desperately 
wicked; and I saw that all have sinned and come 
short of the glory of God.’ This evening she was 
on her way to a brilliant social function. She is 
society's darling, the gayest of a gay and distin- 
guished coterie. Wealth, beauty and popularity are 
all hers. But, for some strange reason, as she was 
being driven in her splendid equipage to the ball, the 


218 A Casket of Cameos 


old thoughts came surging back upon her. The old 
question repeated itself again and again. Years be- 
fore, as a little child, she had memorized the ques- 
tions and answers of the Westminster Shorter Cate- 
.chism; and to-night, sitting in her carriage, the first 
question and the first answer returned to her 
troubled mind: ‘What is the chief end of man?’ 
‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him 
for ever.’ 

To enjoy Him for ever—it was her one desire! 

To glorify God—but how? 

‘I saw,’ she cries, ‘that all have sinned and come 
short of the glory of God!’ Leaving the pleasures 
to which she had looked forward with such bright 
anticipations, she hurried home from the brilliant 
ballroom, and, speaking to nobody as she passed 
along the hall and up the stairs, she sought the 
silence of her dainty room. And here she is, charm- 
ingly robed and bejewelled, yet weeping as though 
her heart must break. The old question is as in- 
sistent as ever; yet, still, there is no answer. She 
has relied upon her integrity, her charity, her ex- 
emplary behavior; but she feels that she is building 
upon the sand. Jis is not the true foundation. 


IV 


The question is answered at last! The beautiful 
Lady Selina has married into one of the noblest 
houses in England. She is now the Countess of 
Huntingdon. And, in marrying the Earl, she has 





Countess of Huntingdon’s Text 219 


formed a fast friendship with his sisters, Lady Betty 
and Lady Margaret Hastings. By this time strange 
things are happening in England. All over the 
country men are preaching: they are preaching with- 
out a book; they are preaching in fields, on vil- 
lage greens, and by the open roadside. Everybody 
is talking about this startling innovation. Moved 
by curiosity, the Ladies Betty and Margaret go to 
hear the new preachers. They can scarcely believe 
jj their ears. These men talk about religion as if re-j) 
! ligion really mattered! They speak with fervor, | 
with urgency, and with wistful entreaty. There are 
teats in their eyes as they tell of the love of God, 
of the grace of Christ, of the wondrous virtue of the 
Cross, and of their own experience of the divine 
mercy. The Lady Margaret capitulates uncondi- 
tionally; her life is transfigured; and she enters into 
a gladness of which she had never previously 
dreamed. She tells everybody of her radiant ex- 
perience. Her sister-in-law, the Countess of Hunt- 
ingdon, is ill; but, sitting by her bedside, the Lady 
Margaret tells her that, ‘since she had known the 
Lord Jesus, and trusted Him for life and salvation, 
she had been as happy as an angel!’ The Countess 
is profoundly impressed both by the words and by 
the shining countenance of the speaker. She vaguely 
feels that she has found a clue to the baffling prob- 
lem that has distressed her so long. As soon as she 
is allowed a book, she reads carefully the First 
Epistle to the Corinthians, always her favorite por- 


220 A Casket of Cameos 


tion. ‘Not many wise, not many mighty, not many 
noble are called, says Paul, in the first chapter of 
that epistle. ‘Not many! ‘Oh, how I thank God 
for that little letter “s/” her ladyship used to say. 
‘Supposing, sitting up in bed, I had read that not any 
noble are called!’ She read on until she came to 
this: ‘Other foundation can no man lay than that 
is laid, which is Jesus Christ? There was the an- 
swer to her question! 

‘Since I have trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ for 
life and salvation, the Lady Margaret had said, ‘I 
have been as happy as an angel! 

‘Other foundation can no man lay than that ts laid, 
which is Jesus Christ’ 

‘Now,’ says her biographer, ‘the day began to 
dawn! Jesus the Sun of Righteousness arose, and 
burst in meridian splendor on her benighted soul. 
The scales fell from her eyes and opened a passage 
for the light of life. It streamed in, and death and 
darkness fled before it. When, in her own appre- 
hension, upon the point of perishing, the words of 
the Lady Margaret had returned strongly to her 
recollection, and she had felt an earnest desire, re- 
nouncing every other hope, to cast herself wholly 
upon Christ for life and salvation. From her bed 
she lifted up her heart to her Saviour; all her dis- 
tresses and fears were immediately removed, and 
she was filled with joy and peace in believing. She 
determined thenceforward to present herself te God, 
as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, which, she 





Countess of Huntingdon’s Text 221 


was now convinced, was her reasonable service.’ 

‘On what foundation could she rest her hope of 
eternal happiness?’ she had asked, beside that rustic 
grave. 

‘Since I trusted in Christ, the Lady Margaret had 
said, ‘I have been as happy as an angel! 

‘Other foundation can no man lay than that is 
laid, which is Jesus Christ.’ 

‘Renouncing every other hope, her biographer 
tells us, ‘she cast herself wholly upon Christ for life 
and salvation,’ 

That night after the ball she felt that she had 
been building upon drifting sand; she felt now that 
her faith was founded upon the Rock of Ages. 


V 


Never was a vow fulfilled more literally, more 
completely and more cheerfully than the vow that 
the young Countess registered on that memorable 
day. ‘She determined to present herself to God as 
a living sacrifice, and she did! From that moment 
to the end of her life she devoted the whole of her 
private income to the spread of the revival. For the 
preachers who were driven to the fields and high- 
ways she built attractive sanctuaries. She called 
George Whitefield, John Wesley, and other of the 
flaming spirits of that stirring time, to her drawing- 
room, and summoned the greatest in the land to hear 
them. The most dissolute men of the period and the 
greatest scoffers in the country partook of her hos- 


222 A Casket of Cameos 


pitality. Princes and peers, actors and poets, states- 
men and authors—you can scarcely find one distin- 
guished name in the annals of the time but you will 
find that name also among the Countess of Hunting- 
don’s guests. From the moment at which God set 
her soul at liberty she had such a thirst for the 
conversion of others that she compared herself to a 
ship in full sail, scudding before the wind, borne on 
by such an influence as could not be described. She 
took the movement that was struggling for ex- 
pression in the highways and by-ways of England 
and introduced it into courts and castles. As Car- 
dinal Newman says, ‘she opened new worlds to the 
revival.’ In the nature of things, the Cardinal re- 
garded the Countess as the great high priestess of a 
poisonous heresy; but he doffs his hat to her in 
spite of everything. He salutes her as ome who 
simply and unconditionally gave up this world 
for the next. She is, he says, an example for all 
time. “She was the representative, in an evil day, 
of the rich becoming poor for Christ; of delicate 
women putting off their soft attire and wrapping 
themselves in sackcloth for the kingdom of heaven’s 
sake.’ The Cardinal finds the whole story ‘very 
stirring and very touching.’ The converts of the 
Countess, among both high and low, were innumer- 
able. For whilst, three times a week, she crowded 
her drawing-room with the lordliest in the land, 
she assiduously visited among the poorest of the 
poor. In order to supply the country with a suc- 


Countess of Huntingdon’s Text 223 


cession of evangelists, she built colleges, providing 
in the trust deeds that the men trained under her 
auspices should be free to join any denomination 
they liked. As long as she had money she built 
churches all over the country, and then she sold her 
jewels to build more. Before our great missionary 
societies were established she planted missions on 
the West Coast of Africa, in the South Seas, and 
among the Red Indians of North America. In order 
that she might send the gospel unto every creature, 
she administered her modest household with the 
strictest frugality, and, at the age of eighty-four, 
died in debt. She made religion so lovable that the 
whole nation was sweetened by her influence. In 
an age in which the atmosphere of the English 
Court was by no means pure, the King would allow 
no jests to be made at her expense; and when, one 
day, Lady Charlotte Edwin broke that rule, the 
Prince of Wales rebuked her by saying that he 
would be very glad, on his deathbed, to be able to 
seize the skirt of the Countess of Huntingdon’s 
mantle. 


VI 


All this was the superstructure; not the founda- 
tion. She clung to her text to the last. Other 
foundation can no man lay than that ts laid, which 
is Jesus Christ. Lest there should be any misappre- 
hension, she put her faith in writing a few months 
before she died. ‘J do hereby declare, she said, 


224 A Casket of Cameos 


‘that all my present peace and my hope of future 
glory depend wholly, fully, and finally upon the 
merits of Jesus Christ my Lord and Saviour. I 
commit my soul into His arms unreservedly as a 
subject of His sole mercy to all etermty. “There is 
but One Foundation,’ she exclaimed near the end, 
‘there is but One Foundation on which a sinner 
like me can rest.’ That was the Foundation for 
which, as a little girl, she had sighed. She found 
it in her early womanhood, and, for sixty years, 
she built upon it bravely. 





i 
* 
} 


XIX 
CHARLES SIMEON’S TEXT 


I 


CHARLES SIMEON is dead—in more senses than one. 
His name is seldom mentioned: his works are never 
read. Yet, for all that, he is one of our epoch-makers 
and empire-builders and history-makers. To few 
men do we owe more than we owe to him. Has he 
not been canonized by the most penetrating, the most 
illustrious and the most critical of all our ecclesias- 
tical biographers? Sir James Stephen says that if 
the Church were to revise and correct her standard 
of personal values, she would mercilessly purge her 
roll of saints. He points with disdain to many pon- 
derous names in our present calendar. What, he 
demands, have Saint Dunstan, or Saint George, or 
Saint Swithin, or Saint Margaret, or Saint Crispin 
done for us that they should elbow out Saint Charles 
of Cambridge? It is true that he never attained to 
any exalted rank or dignity; he never achieved any 
thrilling or romantic exploit to send his name echo- 
ing about the world. As a young man leaving col- 
lege he was appointed to the charge of Holy Trinity, 
Cambridge; and when death overtook him fifty-four 
years later, he was still ministering unostentatiously 
225 


226 A Casket of Cameos 


to the same people. ‘But,’ as Lord Macaulay says, 
‘if you knew what his authority and influence were, 
and how they extended from Cambridge to the most 
remote corners of England, you would allow that 
his real sway in the Church was far greater than 
that of any Primate.’ So speaks one British states- 
man; and another, Sir James Stephen, has a pas- 
sage to much the same effect. “The splendor of a 
bishop’s mitre pales,’ Sir James declares, ‘before 
that nobler episcopate to which Charles Simeon was 
elevated by popular acclamation. His diocese em- 
braced every city of his native land and extended to 
many of its most remote dependencies. In every part 
of the empire he could point to teachers who revered 
him as the guide of their youth and the counsellor of 
their later years.’ His disciples have become more 
famous than their master; for many an illustrious 
name which has become a household word among us 
would never have been heard of but for the beautiful 
and potent influence of Saint Charles of Cambridge. 

Some men make history noisily; you hear, far 
off, the clanging of their hammers. Circumstanced 
as they are, it is the only way in which the work 
can be done. The time is ripe for violent methods 


and resounding blows. The iron is hot and the anvil 


stands ready. But whilst the village blacksmith 
works in one way, the village artist works in quite 
another. There are men who make history as the 
sun makes daylight. They are silent as the dawn. 
Of that quiet company Charles Simeon is the most 








i te i ee a ei 


Charles Simeon’s Text 227 


distinguished representative. He captivated every- 
body by the serene calm of his tremendous passion. 
_| {ft was Charles Simeon’s deadly earnestness that so 
|| deeply impressed William Wilberforce. It im- 
pressed everybody. Even his critics relented when 
they heard him. An earnest man carries at his 
girdle the magic key that unlocks all hearts. At his 
Sesame every door swings open. Therein lies the 
secret of Charles Simeon’s amazing and historic tri- 
umphs. There he stands in Trinity pulpit, a man 
of medium height, with the easy movements of the 
trained athlete! His face is cultured and kindly: 
his hair is very fair: and in his hazel eyes there is 
the suggestion of purposefulness and high resolve. 
His style of speech is not prepossessing. His voice 
is weak and unmusical; his address is by no means 
graceful; and, viewed from some angles, his appear- 
ance is a little grotesque. But, as soon as he be- 
comes impassioned, we forget all that. His voice 
becomes fervent and compelling: his gestures, be- 
coming more natural as he becomes less nervous, 
are expressive of an intense desire to convey the full 
force of his argument or appeal: he strikes you as 
feeling deeply every word that he utters: his face is 
illumined by intensity and pleasant animation. 
‘Who,’ asked Canon Abner Brown, ‘who ever heard 
a dry sermon from Simeon’s lips, or had to listen 
to a dull remark in conversation with him?’ You 
feel that, on the still altar of this man’s soul, a great 
fire burns. At that fire, torches were lit that dis- 


228 A Casket of Cameos 


pelled the darkness of continents. But when, and 
in what way, was that flame itself kindled? That 
is the question. 


Il 


And the answer to that question is that the life of 
Charles Simeon was dominated, for nearly sixty 
years, by one sublime passage of Scripture. He was 
never tired of quoting it. He used to speak rap- 
turously of ‘its overwhelming and incomprehensible 
grandeur. He was never so happy as when preach- 
ing onit. It occurs repeatedly in his correspondence. 
I must make one or two extracts from his letters. 
Here is one addressed to Miss Elliott: 

‘My dear Ellen,’ he says, ‘Only get your soul 
deeply and abidingly impressed with the doctrine of 
the Cross and everything else will soon find its 
proper place in your system. Labor from day to 
day to comprehend the breadth and length and depth 
and height, and to know the love of Christ which 
passeth knowledge. That is all 1 want.’ 

Three years later I find him writing to the Rev. 
J. Venn on the proper discharge of his ministerial 
duties. Mr. Venn has written stating his difficulties, 
concluding the list with ‘&c., &c.’ Mr. Simeon urges 
him, in his reply, to get comprehensive views of the 
breadth and length and depth and height, and to 
know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge. 
“Then,” he asks, triumphantly, ‘what will all your 
&c.’s come to?’ 





Charles Simeon’s Text 220 


In the Narrative of Mr. Simeon’s Last Illness, 
appended to Canon Carus’s great biography, we are 
told that, as soon as he began to fail, his mind 
turned to his text. ‘I am fully determined,’ he said, 
‘to begin at once a set of sermons on that grand sub- 
ject in Ephesians: That ye may be able to com- 
prehend what is the breadth and length and depth 
and height, and to know the love of Christ which 
passeth knowledge. I don’t expect or desire to 
preach them; but, if my life be spared, write them 
I will! 

A fortnight before he died, he was still harping 
upon the same theme. ‘During the greater part of 
Thursday,’ says Canon Carus, ‘his whole mind was 
absorbed upon his favorite passage: That ye may 
be able to comprehend what is the breadth and 
length and depth and height, and to know the love 
of Christ which passeth knowledge. His thoughts 
were fixed intently on this glorious theme. He de- 
clared that he thought that no higher honor could 
be conferred upon him than to be permitted to pre- 
pare for publication a set of discourses on that text. 
‘It is,’ he said, ‘the grandest subject I can conceive 
of. I should think a life well spent in which one 
wrote four sermons on that passage in a manner 
worthy of it? The subject was in his mind all the 
time. 

The text not only dominated him, it permeated 
him. His entire personality became steeped and 
drenched and saturated with the spirit of it. Ac- 


230 A Casket of Cameos 


quaintances like William Wilberforce, and histo- 
rians like Sir James Stephen, were arrested by it. 
‘Charles Simeon is staying with us,’ writes Wilber- 
force, ‘his heart glowing with the love of Christ. 
How full he is of that Jove! Oh, that I might copy 
him as he copies Christ!’ Sir James Stephen speaks 
of Simeon’s life as a triumph of love. ‘Slowly, 
painfully, but with unfaltering hopes, he toiled 
through more than fifty successive years, in the same 
narrow chamber and among the same humble con- 
gregation, requited by no emoluments, stimulated 
by no animating occurrences, and unrewarded, until 
the near approach of old age, by the gratitude and 
the cordial respect of the society amidst which he 
lived. Love soaring to the Supreme with the low- 
liest self-abasement, and stooping to the most abject 
with the meekest self-forgetfulness, bore him on- 
ward, through fog or sunshine, through calm or 
tempest. His whole life was but one long labor of 
love—a. labor often obscure, often misapplied, often 
unsuccessful, but never intermitted, and, at last, 
triumphant.’ 

There can be no doubt, then, about Charles 
Simeon’s text. I had, in my congregation at Hobart, 
an old Quaker gentleman of quaint and charming 
ways. I knew that he had recently moved, and, 
chancing to meet him one day on the street, I 
asked where he now lived. ‘Well,’ he replied, with 
a characteristic smile, ‘I’m living in the Epistle to 
the Ephesians!’ Charles Simeon dwelt there too. 





Charles Simeon’s Text 231 


He made his home in the love that passeth knowl- 
edge. But what led him, in the first instance, to 
take up his residence there? 


ine 


Bishop Moule says that Simeon’s story of his con- 
version deserves to rank among our religious 
classics side by side with the spiritual autobiogra- 
phies of David, Paul, Augustine, Luther and Bun- 
yan. As a boy at Eton, and as an undergraduate 
at Cambridge, Charles Simeon was troubled by the 
thought of his evil and corrupt desires. “To enter 
into particulars,’ he says, “would serve no good end. 
My sins were more in number than the hairs of my 
head, or than the sands upon the seashore.’ He 
found that it was compulsory, under penalty of ex- 
pulsion from the University, that he should attend 
the Lord’s Supper. ‘My conscience told me,’ he 
writes, ‘that Satan was as fit to go as I was,’ and 
he resolved that, since he must go, he must prepare 
himself for the awful ordeal. He bought a book— 
Bishop Wilson on The Lord’s Supper—and applied 
himself earnestly to its study. He became much 
interested in Bishop Wilson’s exposition of the story 
of the Scapegoat. He seemed to see the Jewish 
priest laying his hands upon the creature’s head and 
confessing over it the transgressions of the people; 
and he watched the scapegoat, as, bearing the guilt 
imputed to it, it went to its death in the desert. 
‘Suddenly,’ says Mr. Simeon, ‘the thought rushed to 


232 A Casket of Cameos 


my mind: “What! may I transfer all my guilt to 
Another? Has God provided an offering for me 
that |] may lay my sins on His head? Then, God 
willing, I will not bear them on my own soul one 
moment longer. I will lay my sins on the sacred 
head of Jesus.” ’ This was at Easter-time, 1779; he 
was then in his twentieth year. 

‘On Easter Sunday, April 4,’ he tells us, ‘I awoke 
early with these words upon my heart and lips: 
“Jesus Christ is risen to-day; Hallelujah! MHalle- 
lujah!’ I had as full a conviction that I relied on 
the Lord Jesus Christ alone for salvation as I had 
of my own existence. From that hour peace flowed 
in rich abundance into my soul.’ He recognized, 
in the Risen Saviour, the Lamb of God who had 
taken his sins and borne them completely away. 
The love that made such a sacrifice on his behalf 
overwhelmed him, as he said, by its incompre- 
hensible grandeur; and he set himself from that 
hour to comprehend the breadth and length and 
depth and height and to know the love of Chnist 
which passeth knowledge. 

He commemorated that unforgettable experience 
with each returning Eastertide. ‘I look forward 
with peculiar delight to Passion-week,’ he says, 
nearly thirty years afterwards. ‘It has always been 


with me a season to be remembered, not only on 


account of the stupendous mysteries which we then 
commemorate, but because, on Easter Day, 1779, I 
was enabled, through God’s unbounded mercy, to 





Charlies Simeon’s Text 233 


see that all my sins were buried in my Redeemer’s 
grave.’ 

‘I am happy, he says in his Diary, on Easter 
Sunday, 1807, ‘Il am happy and thankful that the 
peace which, twenty-eight years ago to-day, flowed 
into my soul, has never been lost, and that I am as 
much bent as ever on securing the prize for my high 
calling.’ 

‘It is now forty years,’ he says in 1819, ‘since 
I found peace through the Lamb of God that taketh 
away the sins of the world. From that time to the 
present hour I have never for a moment lost my hope 
and confidence in my adorable Saviour.’ 

And, not long before his death, he wrote in the 
margin of his Bible a solemn pledge never to forget 
that Easter Sunday, 1779, on which his deliverance 
was completed. 


Rk, 


Charles Simeon’s text is the text of the Four Mag- 
nmitudes: ‘to know the love of Christ which passeth 
knowledge. ‘The Breadth of it! the Length of it! 
the Depth of it! the Height of it! It is, as a Roman 
Catholic expositor has said, “wide as the limits of the 
universe; Jong as the ages of eternity; deep as the 
abyss from which it has redeemed us; and high as 
the throne of God itself.’ ‘Immensity is,’ as Dr. 
Dale finely says, ‘the only adequate symbol of its 
vastness.’ Charles Simeon explored all four of these 
dimensions. 


234 A Casket of Cameos 


He scaled the heights. As you follow him through 
the pages of Canon Carus’s great biography, you 
seem to be watching some patient mountaineer as 
he steadfastly ascends the rugged slopes. Time 
after time he reaches a point that he had mistaken 
for the summit. There is always a peak towering 
above him, beckoning him on and on and on. There 
is always a height beyond the height. Great as 
were the discoveries of the love of Christ that 
Simeon made, he found that love still incompre- 
hensible to the very last. It was always beyond 
him. 

He sounded the depths. He tasted heavy losses, 
crushing sorrows and bitter persecutions. At one 
stage of his career at Holy Trinity, the parishioners 
locked up their seats, undergraduates broke up the 
services, and Mr. Simeon was insulted whenever he 
ventured on the streets. He bore it all uncomplain- 
ingly, and, many years afterwards, told of the 
anguish through which he then passed. ‘One day,’ 
he said, ‘when I was an object of much contempt 
and derision in the University, I strolled forth, buf- 
feted and afflicted, taking my little Greek Testament 
in my hand. I prayed that God would comfort me 
with some cordial from His Word; and opening it, 
the first text which caught my eye was this: They 
found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name; him they 
compelled to bear His cross. Simon, you know, is 
the same name as Simeon. It was the very word 
I needed. What a privilege—to have the cross laid 





. 
| 


Charles Simeon’s Text 235 


on me to bear it with Jesus! It was enough! I 
could leap and sing for joy! “Lay it on me, Lord!’ 
{ cried; and henceforth I bound persecution as a 
wreath of glory round my brow.’ However deep 
the abyss, the love of Christ was always beneath 
him. 

He explored the breadths. Ue felt that the love 
of Christ was vast enough to embrace the whole 
wide world. He, therefore, became one of the 
founders of the Church Missionary Society; and, 
not content with this, set himself to raise up a gen- 
eration of missionaries. For years he gave a tea- 
party once a week to which nobody was personally 
invited, but at which all young men from the Uni- 
versity were welcome. Every Friday evening his 
rooms were thronged. The gatherings became his- 
toric. From that tea table there went forth men 
who, in all parts of the world, made their names 
illustrious and renowned. As the Bishop of Cal- 
cutta said at the time, ‘the last day alone will reveal 
the aggregate of good he thus accomplished. If 
we take, as examples, only four or five cases—David 
Brown—Henry Martyn—John Sargent—Thomas 
Thomason—and Bishop Corrie—we may judge by 
them, as by a specimen, of the hundreds of similar 
instances which occurred during the fifty-four years 
of his ministry.’ He always spoke of his tea-party 
men with a faltering of the voice and a moistening 
of the eye. As an old man of seventy, he glanced 
over a list of the names of the men who, during the 


236 A Casket of Cameos 


forty years between 1789 and 1829, had been most 
successful in missionary work in India. ‘Why,’ he 
exclaimed with delight, ‘they are all of them my 
tea-party men! He ever afterwards referred play- 
fully to India as ‘my diocese.’ 

And he investigated its length. Or, at least, he 
is investigating it still. For, as Bernardine a Piconio 
has already told us, it is long as the ages of eternity. 


V 


The story of his death, which occupies several 
pages, is one of the most exquisitely beautiful nar- 
ratives of the kind on record. ‘Well, sir,’ said 
Canon Carus, as the end approached, ‘you will soon 
comprehend what 1s the breadth and length and 
depth and height and know the love of Christ that 
passeth knowledge! “Ah,’ the dying man exclaimed, 
with rapture, ‘I shall soon understand that text 
now! A little later, seeing that Mr. Simeon was 
fast sinking, Canon Carus pronounced over him the 
Aaronic benediction: ‘The Lord bless thee and keep 
thee: the Lord make Hts face to shine upon thee and 
be gracious unto thee: the Lord hft up His coun- 
tenance upon thee and give thee peace!’ The dying 
man smiled, folded his hands, whispered a faint 
Amen, and never spoke again. ‘The like of his fu- 
neral,’ exclaimed one astonished spectator, ‘was never 
seen before, and never will be seen again. More 
than fifteen hundred gownsmen attended to honor 
him.’ “He went down to his grave,’ says Sir James 





| 
. 
| 
; 
| 


a} 
ee ee 


Charles Simeon’s Text 234 


Stephen, ‘amidst the tears and the benedictions of 
the poor, and with such testimonies of esteem and 
attachment from the learned as Cambridge had 
never before rendered even to the most illustrious 
of her sons. And why? Simply because he had, 
by his lovely life, helped men to comprehend the 
breadih and length and depth and height and to 
know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge. 


XX 
THOMAS WINGFOLD’S TEXT 


I 


At dead of night—and of a winter night at that— 
the young minister sat on a gravestone in the 
churchyard, vainly attempting to answer two tre- 
mendous questions. Ought he to resign? that was 
the second of the two; and the first was even more 
momentous. The Reverend Thomas Wingfold was, 
according to George MacDonald, the curate in 
charge of the Glaston Parish Church. He did not 
quite know why; he had often wondered. He had 
caught himself one morning sitting beside the stream 
in Osterfield Park, pondering that strange problem. 
Why was he a minister? He noticed that the sun 
shone without knowing why it shone; the wind blew 
without knowing why it blew; the waters babbled 
over their gravelly bed without knowing why they 
did so; and he seemed to be living his life on pre- 
cisely the same principle. For him, the ministry 
had always been part of the programme. He was to 
go from home to school; from school to Oxford; 
and from Oxford into the Church. He had neither 
applauded nor resented it; he had simply abandoned 
himself to the inevitable. It was his destiny. He 
felt it his duty to yield his personality to all the 
238 





Thomas Wingfold’s Text 239 


heights and hollows of the mould into which he 
was being thrust. The Church was an ancient insti- 
tution of undoubted respectability ; she possessed cer- 
tain emoluments and required certain observances; 
why should he hesitate to serve her? The work was 
not distasteful. The visitation of the sick was irk- 
some to him, it is true; but, on the other hand, he 
enjoyed the musical side of the services; and he was 
able to meet the demands of the pulpit in virtue of a 
parcel of manuscripts—old, yellow, and respectable 
—which his uncle, a Doctor of Divinity, had con- 
siderately bequeathed to him. And Thomas Wing- 
fold, a young fellow of six and twenty, might have 
laid out the whole of his life on this plan had there 
not come to him hurtling through the smoke of a 
companion’s cigar, a staggering and unanswerable 
question. It was the first of the two questions that, 
in the quiet churchyard, he sought to solve. And it 
was that first and major question that had started 
the second and minor one. 

It was George Bascombe who had raised it. 
George was a brilliant young barrister—and a scep- 
tic. “Everybody who knew him counted George a 
genuine good fellow, and George himself knew little 
to the contrary. See him !—tall and handsome as an 
Apollo and strong as a young Hercules; dressed in 
the top of the fashion; self-satisfied, but not offen- 
sively so; good-natured; ready to smile; as clean 
in conscience, apparently, and as large in sympathy, 
as his shirtfront!’ George Bascombe visited Glas- 


240 A Casket of Cameos 


ton; he and the curate met one evening at the same 
table; and a companionship sprang up between them. 
In the course of a walk one day the two young men 
passed the church. George looked at it and smiled, 
a little scornfully. The curate sought an explana- 
tion of the sneer. : 

“Well, I will be honest with you,’ George replied; 
and, stopping abruptly, he turned square towards his 
companion and took the full-flavored Havana from 
his lips. ‘I like you,’ he went on, ‘for you seem 
reasonable; and besides, a man ought to speak out 
what he thinks. So here goes! Tell me honestly— 
do you beheve one word of all that?’ 

‘The curate,’ George MacDonald says, ‘was taken 
by surprise and made no answer; it was as if he had 
received a sudden blow in the face.’ He evaded a 
direct reply; and, as a result, the question—as such 
questions will—rushed back upon him in his hours 
of solitude. That accounts for our finding him here, 
at dead of night, his brow bathed in perspiration, 
with these two questions taking it in turns to torment 
him. 

DoT really believe the things that I preach? 

Is it my duty to resign my charge? 

He reminds himself that he has done his best; he 
had entered the ministry under a sense of duty; 
and had conscientiously met its obligations. But it 
is cold comfort. ‘It remained a fact that if Bar- 
rister Bascombe were to stand up and assert in full 
congregation that there was no God anywhere in the 


ee a = 


Thomas Wingfold’s Text 241 


universe, he, the minister of the parish, could not, 
on the Church’s part, prove to anybody that there 
was. He could not even think of a single argu- 
ment on his side of the question. ‘Was it even jis 
side of the question? Could he say he believed there 
was a God?’ That was the question—the question 
that George Bascombe had asked him once, and that 
he had since put to himself a hundred times; the 
question that he could not answer; the question that 
had raised another. 

Did he believe? — 

Should he resign? 

He suddenly discovered that a gravestone on a 
November midnight is a cold chair for a study; he 
rose, stretched himself disconsolately, almost de- 
spairingly; looked long at the dark outline of the 
old church and at the tombstones huddled about him; 
and, utterly miserable, went home. 


IT 


Happily, the world is not made up of clerics antl 
infidels. Thomas Wingfold and George Bascombe 
were not the only people in Glaston. Every village 
contains a few oddities peculiarly its own; you can- 
not imagine such people living anywhere else. The 
oddities of Glaston were a couple of dwarfs—Joseph 
Polwarth and his niece Rachel. Within the stunted 
and unshapely body of Joseph Polwarth, however, 
there dwelt a cultured mind and a beautiful soul. 
The dwarf was very poor but he sometimes visited 


242 A Casket of Cameos 


the parish church and occupied one of the free seats. 
He soon discovered that the sermons that the curate 
was preaching were not his own; they were copied, 
holusbolus, from the works of Jeremy Taylor. The 
dwarf knew that nobody else suspected it, he there- 
fore resolved to guard the secret jealously. He 
knew nothing of the curate’s indebtedness to his 
dead uncle; but he vaguely felt that the minister was 
sinning ignorantly rather than wilfully; he there- 
fore wrote a kind and courteous note, drawing his 
attention to the matter. The discovery of his uncle’s 
dishonesty, and of his own complicity, intensified 
considerably the wretchedness of Mr. Wingfold’s 
position and added to the difficulty of his course. 
Moreover, it raised again the old question. Dud he 
really believe? If he really believed, would he have 
had need of such pitiful makeshifts and desperate 
expedients as these? 

In his extremity he sought the assistance of his 
accuser. He went to see the dwarf, and, attracted 
by the little man’s transparent sincerity and ready 
sympathy, poured out his heart to him. 

“What shall I do? he cried, in closing his sor- 
rowful confession. ‘How am I to know that there 
is a God?’ 

And then the dwart threw a new light on the 
entire situation. He urged the minister to lay less 
stress on the poverty of his mmtellect and to pay more 
heed to the hunger of his heart. The question is, he 
said, not [s there a God? but If there be a God, how 


NE = 


Thomas Wingfold’s Text 243 


am I to find Him? The best possible evidence of 
the existence of God would be—to know Him! 
And then he told of his own experience. He, too, 
had had his days of darkness and of doubt. He had 
tread everything that came within his reach, and 
nothing had helped him. Then it occurred to him 
that, in common fairness, he ought to read the New 
Testament from cover to cover. 

‘I began,’ he said, “but did not that night get 
through the first chapter. Conscientiously, I read 
every word of the genealogy; but when I came to 
the twenty-third verse and read “Thou shalt call 
his name JESUS; for he shall save lis people from 
their sins,’ I fell on my knees. To tell you all that 
followed, if I could recall and narrate it in order, 
would take hours. Suffice it that from that moment 
I was a student, a disciple. I had found the man 
Christ Jesus, and in Him had found the Father of 
Him and of me. My dear sir, no conviction can be 
got, or, if it could be got, would be of any sufficing 
value, through that dealer in second-hand goods, the 
intellect. I know only one way of proving to your- 
self that there is a God, and that way is Jesus Christ 
as he is revealed to the heart that seeks Him.’ 

Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! | 

Jesus, the Saviour from human sin! 

Jesus, the Revelation of the Heart of God! 

The minister felt that the key that would turn the 
two locks of his dungeon, the secret that would 
solve both his questions, had been placed in his 


244 A Casket of Cameos 


hands. On the next Sunday he confessed from the 
pulpit that the manuscripts that he had been read- 
ing were not his own; and, even before Sunday 
came, he had set out, like the wise men of an older 
time, to find JESUS. 


HN 


Like the magi following the star, the curate fol- 
lowed the glimmer of light that the dwarf had 
pointed out to him. And, like the wise men’s star, 
it led him to the Saviour. He was being tormented 
one day by the old, old questions: 

Do I believe the things I preach? 

Is there a God? How can I tell there 1s a God? 

Shall I give up? Must I resign? 

When, suddenly, a great and golden text shone, 
like a burst of sunlight, across his misty path. “The 
words arose in his mind: Come unto Me, all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 
His heart filled. He pondered over them.’ 

‘I know only one way of proving to yourself that 
there is a God; and that way is Jesus Christ! the 
dwarf had said. 

‘Come unto Me, and I will give you rest! said the 
text. 

He came! He, the curate, knelt at the feet of the 
Crucified. And, on the following Sunday, the whole 
congregation felt that the minister had suddenly 
become very sure of God. For he preached, and 
preached as he had never done before, from the 





Thomas Wingfold’s Text 245 


words Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy 
laden, and I will give you rest. ‘Come, then,’ he 
said, as he drew to a close, ‘come and see whether 
His heart cannot heal thine. He knows what sighs 
and tears are; and, if He knew no sin in Himself, 
the more pitiful must it have been to Him to behold 
the sighs and tears that guilt wrung from the tor- 
tured hearts of others. Let us get rid of this misery 
of ours. It is slaying us. Here is One who says He 
knows; take Him at His word. Go to Him who, 
in the might of His eternal tenderness and human 
pity, says: Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you resi! 


iV 


Every village has its tragedies as well as its oddi- 
ties. At Glaston there dwelt Helen Lingard. It 
was at her home that George Bascombe and the 
curate had met; for George was laying siege to 
Helen’s heart. And Helen had at home a brother, 
Leopold, who was slowly dying, and dying with 
the awful sin of murder on his hands. In a frenzy 
of passion and jealousy he had stabbed his sweet- 
heart. Helen was at church that morning, and, on 
her return, she hurried to Leopold’s bedside. 

‘I never saw such a change on any man as there 
is on Mr. Wingfold,’ she said. “Do you know, he 
preached as if he actually believed the things he was 
saying, and not only that, but as if he expected to 
persuade us of them too. His text was Come unio 


246 A Casket of Cameos 


Me, and I will give you rest, a common enough text, 
but somehow it seemed fresh to him and he made 
it look fresh to me. Just think, Poldie,’ she added, 
passionately, ‘just think! What if there should be 
some help in the great wide universe somewhere— 
a heart that feels for us both as my heart feels for 
you! Oh, wouldn’t it be grand! If there should 
be Somebody somewhere who could take this 
gnawing serpent from my heart! Come unto Me, 
he said. Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest. That’s what 
he said; oh, if it could be true?’ 

And sometimes, when all the doors between his 
bedroom and the drawing room were open, Leopold 
heard Helen at the piano singing the ‘Comfort ye,’ 
from The Messiah, And once when she came to the 
words: Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest, she broke 
down; and then, with sudden resolution, she raised 
the top of the piano, began again, and sang the 
words as she had never sung them in her life. 

‘Helen,’ said Leopold, a few days later, ‘I have 
been thinking all day of what you told me on Sun- 
day.’ 

“What was that, Poldie?’ 

“Why, those words of course—what else? Come 
unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and 
I will give you rest. You sang them to me after- 
wards, you know. Helen, I should like to see Mr. 
Wingfold.’ 





Thomas Wingfold’s Text 247 


It was the one thing that Helen had most wished 
to avoid. Under the minister’s influence, Leopold 
might reveal his guilty secret, confess his crime, and 
whelm the family in shame! Mr. Wingfold came, 
however, and they talked about the text. The min- 
ister soon found that nothing calmed and brightened 
the dying man like a talk about Jesus. 

‘When,’ Mr. Wingfold said one day, ‘when He 
was in the world, He said Come unto Me, all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest! 
It is rest you want, my poor boy, not deliverance 
from danger or shame, but rest, such peace of mind 
as you had when you were a child. Come to Him! 
Ask Him to forgive you and make you clean and 
set things right for you! If He will not do it, then 
He is not the Saviour of men and is wrongly named 
HESUSL 

Leopold hid his face. But he yielded at last, 
accepted the great invitation, confessed his dread- 
ful sin, and found the peace that passeth under- 
standing. 

And so did Helen. She was talking one day to 
her sceptical lover. 

“You need no God,’ she said, ‘therefore you seek 
none. If you need none, you are right, I dare say, 
to seek none. But J need God—oh, I cannot tell 
how much I need Him!—and I will go on seeking 
for Him to the last!’ She sought the curate’s help, 
and he pointed her to Jesus. It is the only way. 
The magi—the scientists of an older time—had 


248 A Casket of Cameos 


searched the universe for finality, for truth, for 
God. They found all that they sought at Beth- 
Jehem. | 
V 
‘Is there a God?’ asks the scepticism of my soul 
within me and the scepticism of the world around. 
‘Search for Him! replies the wise little dwarf at 
Glaston, ‘and when you find Him you shall know! 
‘Come unto Me, says the text, going one step 
further, ‘Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden and I will give you rest! 
It is sound philosophy. What is it that Principal 
Shairp sings? 
And must I wait till science give 
All doubts a full reply? 
Nay, rather, while the sea of doubt 
Is raging wildly round about, 
Questioning of life and death and sin, 
Let me but creep within 
Thy fold, O Christ, and at Thy feet 
Take but the lowest seat; 
And hear Thine awful voice repeat 
In gentlest accents, heavenly sweet: 


Come unto Me and rest; 
Believe Me and be blest! 


‘Come unto ME! says the Saviour. Religion is 
intensely and essentially personal. Tull we find 
HIM we are groping among the fogs of November: 
when we find HJM we are in the sunshine of June 
and, having found Him, can never seriously doubt 
again. 





| 


eee ee eee 


ea time) ey 


XXI 
LORD SHAY TRSBURY Si TENT 


I 


Lorp SHAFTESBURY’S text was emblazoned, bit by 
bit, on the craped banners that were borne in his 
funeral procession. When the cortége turned into 
Parliament Street, on its way to Westminster Abbey, 
a sight was witnessed which, as Mr. Edwin Hodder 
says, can never be erased from the memory of the 
generation that beheld it. London, the city that has 
gazed upon so many solemn pomps and stately 
pageants, had never seen such a funeral. From 
the moment at which the coffin emerges from the 
home at Grosvenor Square, till the momert of its 
arrival at the Abbey doors, the great black crowds 
stood bareheaded in the driving rain to do honor 
to one who had made the world a happier place for 
everybody in it. Lord Shaftesbury had literally 
clothed a great people with spontaneous mourning, 
and was going down to his grave amid the benedic- 
tions of the poor. The most destitute and degraded 
had somehow contrived to procure a little tatter of 
black to wear upon the coatsleeve or in the bonnet; 
for every individual in that immense throng felt 
dumbly the poignant anguish of a personal sorrow. 


249 


250 A Casket of Cameos 


The coffin, when it lay in the Abbey, was buried 
beneath masses of the most exquisite flowers. There 
were ornate wreaths from the crowned heads 
of Europe, and there were bunches of violets from 
the children of the ragged schools. Some of these 
fragrant tributes had been sent by princesses, and 
some by flower-girls; some had come from the 
homes of statesmen and some from the homes of 
costermongers; some from palaces and some from 
alms-houses; some from millionaires and some from 
crossing-sweepers, shoe-blacks and newsboys. 

But the incident—the outstanding incident—the 
incident that can never be forgotten—the incident 
that brings into dramatic and striking prominence 
Lord Shaftesbury’s text: what was it? Let Mr. 
Hodder tell his own story. ‘As the funeral cortége 
passed into Parliament Street,’ he says, “a sight was 
seen which will never be forgotten while this gen- 
eration lasts’; and he proceeds in graphic language 
to describe it. Grouped on the east—or river—side 
of the street were deputations from Homes and 
Asylums and Refuges and Schools and Societies and 
Training Ships; indeed, from all the Missions and 
Charities which, like flowers in the springtime, had 
sprung into existence under the magic of Lord 
Shaftesbury’s influence. Each of these grateful 
groups bore a banner hung with crape; and on each 
banner were emblazoned some such words as these: 
‘I was an hungered and ye gave Me meat’: ‘I was 
thirsty and ye gave Me drink’: ‘I was a stranger 


Lord Shaftesbury’s Text 261 


and ye took Me w’: ‘I was naked and ye clothed 
Me’: ‘I was sick and ye visited Me’: and ‘I was in 
prison and ye came unto Me.’ Bands of music, play- 
ing the Dead March, were ranged at intervals, and, 
as the procession passed, these, heading the deputa- 
tions with their eloquent banners, fell in and marched 
towards the Abbey. 

There, then, on the banners, stands Lord Shaftes- 
bury’s text! And if, that day, Lord Shaftesbury 
could have spoken, he would have said, “Lord, when 
saw I Thee an hungered, and fed Thee? or thirsty, 
and gave Thee drink? When saw I Thee a stranger, 
and took Thee in? or naked, and clothed Thee? or 
when saw I Thee sick or in prison, and came unto 
Thee?’ And the answer would have consisted of 
the old familiar words: ‘Verily, I say unto you, 
inasmuch as ve have done it unto the least of these, 
my brethren, ye have done it unto Me 


Il 


Lord Shaftesbury’s religion, like his text, was in- 
tensely personal. The emphatic word in the text, 
the astonishing word, the word that elicits a startled 
reply, alike from the righteous and the wicked, is the 
personal pronoun. 

‘IT was an hungered and ye gave ME meat!’ says 
the Voice from the Throne, approvingly. 

‘When? cry those upon the right hand in sur- 
prise, “when saw we THEE an hungered and gave 
THEE meat?’ 


252 A Casket of Cameos 


‘T was an hungered and ye gave Me no meat! 
says the Voice from the Throne, reproachfully. 

‘When?’ cry those upon the left hand in surprise, 
‘when saw we THEE an hungered and gave THEE 
no meat?’ 

‘Inasmuch, replies the Voice from the Throne, 
‘inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did 
it unto MEL 

‘Inasmuch as ye did it not unto the least of these, 
ye did tt not unto MEP 

In the light of those revealing words, all life is 
reduced to a series of transactions between the in- 
dividual soul and the individual Saviour. Nothing 
is impersonal. Everything that I do, I do to Him; 
my neglect is always the neglect of Him; in Him I 
live and move and have my being. The secret of 
Lord Shaftesbury’s life was a profound recognition 
of this pervasive and penetrative truth. To him the 
living Christ—the Christ who died and rose again— 
was everything. ‘My faith may be summed up in 
one word,’ he used to say, ‘and that one word is 
Jesus.’ In season and out of season he pleaded with 
the churches to give the people the gospel. ‘I be- 
lieve,’ he said, ‘that the sole remedy for all our dis- 
tresses is one of the simplest and one of the oldest; 
the sole, the sovereign remedy is to evangelize the 
people by telling the story of the Cross on every oc- 
casion and in every place. In the stateliest cathedral 
and at the corner of each common street, in the 
royal palace and in the back slums, we must preach 


Lord Shaftesbury’s Text 253 


Christ to the people: we must determine, like Paul, 
to know nothing among men save Jesus Christ and 
Flim crucified. I believe with all my heart that He, 
and He alone, is the power of God unto salvation,’ 

In private life, as in public, it is always the same. 
His journal is punctuated with entries such as this: 


March 30, 1866. Again saw Henry Sturt. He was full 
of the same confidence, calm and resigned. ‘Christ died for 
every one, he said, ‘and for me. Here he realized the 
highest point of Christian life in appropriating to him- 
self, in faith and love, the merits of our Lord and Saviour. 


Lord Shaftesbury’s faith is nothing if not personal. 
Christ and he—he and Christ—deal at first-hand 
with each other. How did so sublime an under- 
standing come into existence? On that point there 
can be no uncertainty at-all. 


Itt 


The angel of Lord Shaftesbury’s pilgrimage was 
Maria Millis. She was only a servant, a simple- 
hearted, affectionate Christian woman, true as steel 
to every conception of duty. ‘She formed a strong 
attachment to the gentle serious child,’ the biography 
tells us, ‘and would take him on her knee and tell 
him Bible stories, especially the sweet story of the 
Manger of Bethlehem and the Cross of Calvary. It 
was her hand that touched the delicate chords of his 
soul and awoke the first music of his spiritual life.’ 
It was Maria Millis who taught him the first prayer 


254 A Casket of Cameos 


that he ever learnt; he used it constantly in later 
years: and, in his old age, and particularly in times 
of sickness, he very frequently found his tongue 
involuntarily framing those simple words. ‘In her 
will,’ we are told, ‘she left him her watch, a hand- 
some gold one, and until the day of his death he 
never wore any other.’ He was fond, even to the 
last, of showing it. ‘That,’ he used to say, ‘was 
given to me by the best friend I ever had!’ 

‘She told him the sweet story of the Manger of 
Bethlehem and the Cross of Calvary! And thus 
she introduced him—a frail little lad of seven—to 
a Friendship that grew more intimate, more potent 
and more fruitful as life went on. 


IV 


William Law says that, if one looks at the way of 
the world, one would hardly think that Christians 
had ever read the twenty-fifth of Matthew. It is 
a grave indictment. If, however, the religion of 
Lord Shaftesbury is, like his text, intensely personal, 
it is also, like his text, intensely practical. It is one 
of the most grievous tragedies of the spiritual realm 
that the soul sometimes finds the sunny climate of an 
ardent evangelism singularly enervating. The faith 
is sound yet nothing comes of it. Nobody can level 
such a charge against the evangelism of Lord 
Shaftesbury. Like his Master, he went about doing 
good. How could it be otherwise when his life was 

‘ 


Lu 


Lord Shaftesbury’s Text 255 


modelled on such a text? The finest comment ever 
made on this great passage in Matthew was penned 
by Lord Charnwood in his Life of Abraham Lin- 
coln. Lord Charnwood remarks that ‘in the most 
moving and the most authentic of all Visions of 
Judgment, men were not set on the right hand or 
the left according as they were of irreproachable or 
reproachable character: they were divided into those 
who did and those who did not.’ ‘Inasmuch as ye 
did tt... ye did it unto Me!’ ‘Inasmuch as ye did 
wt not... ye did tt not to Me! 

The same thought was always uppermost in the 
mind of Lord Shaftesbury. Take a typical instance 
from the record of his mature life. It is a beautiful 
Sunday afternoon in the autumn of his fifty-eighth 
year. Lord Shaftesbury is spending a quiet hour 
with his Bible. It is open at the twenty-fifth of 
Matthew. He has read that noble passage a hun- 
dred times before but it acquires new interest with 
each perusal. Having carefully weighed and pon- 
dered every word, he rises, reaches for his journal, 
and sets down his impressions. Here they are: 


Oct. 11, 1857. Read this afternoon Matthew xxv. 
What a revelation of the future judgment of the human 
race. Those on the left hand are condemned, not for 
murder, robbery, debauchery, not for breaches of the deca- 
logue, or for open blasphemy, not for sins they have com- 
mitted, but for duties they have omitted. Men say ‘J have 
done no harm’; I am not worse than my neighbors; and 
so on. But God takes another view. ‘Have you done 
good?’ He asks. 


256 A Casket of Cameos 


It was because Lord Shaftesbury recognized these 
twin aspects of his text—the intensely personal and 
the intensely practical—that he became the greatest 
doer of his time. ‘Inasmuch as ye did tt, says the 
text, and Lord Shaftesbury’s claim to immortality 
rests on the fact that he did things. The record of 
his achievements fills a volume of eight hundred 
pages. Inthe mines and the factories, in the prisons 
and asylums, among the waifs of the city and the 
toilers on the rural farms, he effected reforms by 
which life was simply transhigured. Existence for 
countless thousands was scarcely tolerable until he 
came to their relief. He revolutionized the whole 
industrial world. His figure became the most 
familiar, the most commanding and the most hon- 
ored in the public life of England. He was singu- 
larly good-looking; tall, slender and extremely 
graceful. His form was statuesque in the perfec- 
tion of its poise and proportions. His head, with 
its handsome face and its clusters of dark curling 
hair, was reminiscent of a classic bust. Whether 
addressing the House of Lords or talking to the 
ragamuffins of a London slum, he was always heard 
with the most profound respect. ‘My Lords,’ ex- 
claimed the Duke of Argyll, in a great political 
speech delivered in 1885, ‘the social reforms of the 
past century have not been due to a political party: 
they have been due to the influence, the character, 
and the perseverance of one man: I refer, of course, 
to Lord Shaftesbury.’ “That,’ said Lord Salisbury, 


Lord Shaftesbury’s Text 257 


in commenting upon the Duke’s statement, ‘is, I 
believe, a very true representation of the facts.’ 
No more convincing proof could be desired that a 
true believer must, in the nature of things, become 
a great achiever. Lord Shaftesbury’s text says so. 


V 


The spiritual world is divided into two hemi- 
spheres—the Mystical and the Material. They are 
both represented in the text: and, for that reason, 
they are both reflected in the life and labors of Lord 
Shaftesbury. The one, if properly cultivated and 
developed, leads naturally and inevitably to the 
other. Even Goethe, in his Parable of the Three 
Reverences, taught us as much. Wilhelm Meister, 
the reader will remember, tells Natalia of the 
strange and mysterious land which he had visited. 
The children in the fields greeted him with three 
kinds of gestures. The first class looked cheer- 
fully up to the sky. These, he was afterwards in- 
formed, represented reverence for things above 
them. The second class looked round upon the 
beauty of the world. These represented reverence 
for things about them. The third class stood with 
downcast eyes. They represented reverence for 
things beneath them. Wilhelm desired further en- 
lightenment, and was taken by the chief to a kind of 
Palace Beautiful. In the first apartment he finds 
exquisite representations of Old Testament story. 
The interpreter explains to him that this place is 


258 A Casket of Cameos 


sacred to the First Reverence—treverence for things 
above us. These stories, he says, have done more 
than anything else to inculcate that lofty sentiment. 
In the second chapel he meets equally beautiful rep- 
resentations of New Testament incidents. He is 
told that he is now in the place sacred to the Second 
Reverence—reverence for things about us. ‘The 
New Testament, he is told, has done more than any- 
thing else to inspire that veneration. Then, moving 
along the corridors, Wilhelm comes to a closed door. 
He asks to be admitted to the sacred precincts of the 
Third Reverence—the reverence for things beneath 
us. But it cannot be. The chief explains that the 
chapel of the Third Reverence is a Sanctuary of 
Sorrow, and only those who have been deeply taught 
in the First and Second Reverences can be admitted 
into that temple of tears. It is a perfect allegory. 
One has not to know much of the world in order 
to learn that, when one comes into contact with men 
and women, he is laying his hand on a quivering 
underworld of heartbreak and of anguish. And 
only those who have been profoundly instructed in 
the Old Testament Reverence for things above them, 
and in the New Testament Reverence for things 
about them, are qualified to look into those pitiful 
faces and those streaming eyes. It was because of 
those old Bible stories that Maria Millis had so 
often unfolded to him; and it was because, at her 
feet, he had caught the spirit of that sweet story of 
the Manger of Bethlehem and the Cross of Calvary, 


Lord Shaftesbury’s Text 250 


that Lord Shaftesbury was able, in later years, to 
embark upon his wonderful humanitarian ministry. 
vi 

It was thus that the text made Lord Shaftesbury 
the greatest practical mystic of all time. He was 
essentially and instinctively a mystic. He saw 
Christ where nobody else discovered Him. As a 
lover hears his lady’s name in the sigh of the wind 
and the song of the birds, so, having learned to 
love his Saviour with all his soul, Lord Shaftesbury 
found Him everywhere. Sir Launfal found Christ 
in the leper. Lord Shaftesbury saw Him in crimi- 
nals, orphans, cripples, paupers, lunatics and chim- 
ney-sweeps. He spent all his time, his fortune and 
his energy on them, because he felt that, inasmuch 
as he did it unto them, he did it unto Him. Thus, 
I find him at dead of night in a thieves’ kitchen. 
Look at him! He is surrounded by hundreds of the 
most desperate criminals in London. They listen 
respectfully as he urges them to abandon their law- 
less lives. “But how,’ one burglar wants to know, 
‘how are we to live if we give it up?’ Lord Shaftes- 
bury urges them to pray for guidance. ‘But, my 
lord,’ one man replies, ‘prayer is very good, but 
prayer won’t fill an empty stomach!’ The objector 
evidently mistook Lord Shaftesbury for a mere 
dreamer of dreams. He did not know his man. 
Lord Shaftesbury took the names of those who sin- 
cerely desired to live honestly, and within a few 


260 A Casket of Cameos 


months he had settled hundreds of them on Cana- 
dian farms or introduced them to honorable and re- 
munerative avocations at home. 

Pray!—there stands the Mystic! 

An Emigration Policy—he is a Practical Mystic! 


Vil 


On his twenty-seventh birthday, Lord Shaftes- 
bury deliberately pledged himself in writing to seek 


two things—ihe honor of God and the happiness of. 


men. When, many years later, Mr. Gladstone was 
asked to draft an inscription for a monument to 
Lord Shaftesbury, he said of him that ‘he devoted 
the influence of his station, the strong sympathies of 
his heart and the great powers of his mind to 
honoring God by serving his fellow-men” Now 
what are these two things but the twin factors that 
we have discovered embedded in the text? They 
colored his entire career. Learning every day to 
love his Saviour a little more devotedly and learn- 
ing every day to serve his fellow-men a little more 
effectively, he wove the pattern of that great text 
into the fabric of a singularly winsome and useful 
life. There is no more to be said: the supreme busi- 
ness of life is to follow his lead. 


=! 


XXII 
DR RaW DALES TEXT 


[ 


Ir was the veteran’s last struggle. Dr. Dale lay 
dying. And, in dying, a horror of great darkness 
fell upon him. He who had established the faith of 
thousands found his own faith failing him. Hap- 
pily he lived long enough to conquer and to tell the 
secret of his victory. The Rev. George Barber sat 
by his bedside at Llanbedr, and, into his ear, the 
sick man poured the story of his conflict. 

‘It was a sad, distressful night in the early stages 
of my illness,’ the doctor said. “The house was 
quiet, all the members of the family having retired 
‘to rest. Soon after midnight I awoke in great pain, 
and a terrible distress crept over me. I was full 
of fear. I did not wish to disturb my wife and 
daughters; they were worn out with anxious watch- 
ing; so I Jay silently struggling against the inde- 
scribable horror of an unknown dread. When the 
‘conflict reached its worst it seemed as though Christ 
Himself came, and, standing close beside me, said: 
Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, 
believe alsoin Me. In my Father’s house are many 
mansions ; if tt were not so, I would have told you; 
I go to prepare a place for you. ‘That,’ added the 

261 


262 A Casket of Cameos 


doctor, with a look in his face that was full of noble 
confidence and glorious hope, ‘that steadied me, and 
I felt strong and safe in the love of Christ.’ 

I am not surprised. Every minister knows that 
the experience is a very common one. ‘Whenever I 
am called to a house of sickness or sorrow,’ said Jan 
Maclaren, “I always read to the troubled folk the 
fourteenth chapter of John. Nothing else is so 
effective. Ifa man is sinking into unconsciousness, 
and you read “Jn my Father’s house are many man- 
sions,” he will come back and whisper “mansions,” 


and he will wait till you finish “where I am there ye — 


may be also’ before he dies in peace.’ Nor is this 
Ian Maclaren’s only tribute to the spiritual charm 
of the familiar verses. For, in one of the most 
affecting scenes in any of his writings, he again in- 
troduces the passage that he found so potent in his 
own ministry. In ‘The Doctor’s Last Journey,’ 
Drumsheugh reads the deathless sentences at the 
deathbed of Doctor Maclure,the truest soul in Drum- 
tochty. ‘It’s a bonnie word!’ exclaimed the dying 
doctor. And, turning back to history once more, 
everybody remembers that, in those last sad days at 
Abbotsford, Lockhart read the self-same chapter to 
Sir Walter Scott. ‘It’s a great comfort,’ sighed Sir 
Walter, ‘a very great comfort!’ 

‘Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, 
believe also in Me. In my Father’s house are many 
mansions: tf it were not so, I would have told you: 
I go to prepare a place for you. 





Dr. R. W. Dale’s Text 268 


‘That steadied me, says Dr, Dale, ‘and I felt 
strong and safe in the love of Christ? 

‘It’s a bonnie word!’ exclaims Doctor Maclure. 

‘It’s a great comfort, sighs Sir Walter Scott, ‘a 
very great comfort! 

And all three of these testimonies were uttered on 
the brink of eternity. 


II 


Let nobody suppose, however, that these monu- 
mental words were designed for the special con- 
solation of the dying. Such an assumption would 
be the very reverse of the truth. They were first 
uttered by the dying for the special consolation of 
the living. ‘The Redeemer of the world was turn- 
ing His face towards the Cross, and was comforting 
the desolate hearts of His disciples. He was brac- 
ing them to serve and to suffer; He was guarding 
them against the paralysis of despair. The ministry 
of these great words to the dying has been one of 
the most arresting experiences of the Church; but 
it is in their ministry to the living that they achieve 
their most splendid triumphs. 

A few years ago, eighteen million people in the 
United States set themselves to a systematic study 
of John’s Gospel. Dr. W. T. Ellis commented on 
the circumstance in the columns of the Boston Tran- 
script. He describes the sensual, pleasure-loving, 
materialistic and decadent old city of Ephesus—the 
city in which the words were written. He pictures 


264 A Casket of Cameos 


the members of the Ephesian Church imploring the 
aged John to commit to paper the sacred and beauti- 
ful memories with which he had so often fortified 
their faith and enriched their hearts. And he points 
out that ‘the little company of devout disciples, 
whom even the corruption-laden air of a great 
heathen capital could not enervate, little dreamed, 
when they besought their aged pastor and spiritual 
father to write down his personal memories and his 
interpretation of Jesus Christ, that the biography 
penned by John would one day be studied in five 
hundred languages, and that it would become the 
text of special study for millions of persons in con- 
tinents then undreamed of.’ In regard to the con- 
tents of the book, Dr. Ellis mentions only one pas- 
sage. Itis not ‘God so loved the world... or ‘Him 
that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out. It 
is “Let not your heart be troubled’ ‘Peep,’ says Dr. 
Ellis, ‘into any mature Christian’s copy of the Bible 
and it will be found to open most naturally at the 
fourteenth chapter of John’s Gospel, where the best- 
thumbed passages will be seen to be those begin- 
ning: “Let not your heart be troubled.’ Beyond 
a doubt, this old book, which springs like a white 
lily of spirituality out of the black mud of Ephesian 
heathendom, is the most popular and the most help- 
ful bit of writing to be found in all the world. 
Myriads and millions of persons, of all sorts and 
conditions, have found it a veritable book of life.’ 
Now this is extremely significant. We are to peep, 


Dr. B. W. Dale’s Text 265 


be it observed, into the Bible of a mature Christian: 
this mellowed believer has not yet come to the val- 
ley of the shadow; it is in the rough and tumble of 
life that he has found the words so precious. They 
form ‘a veritable book of life, Dr. Ellis maintains. 
The experiences of the ages would amply vindicate 
his conclusion. We must go into the matter a little 
more thoroughly. 


iil 


From a great cloud of witnesses I select two as 
typical. Both are members of a colored race. One 
is from history, one from fiction. One is a woman, 
the other a man. 

Dr. Grattan Guinness was here in Australia 
when, in July, 1906, he received the sad news of 
the death of his daughter, Lucy. ‘Never,’ wrote 
Mrs. Guinness, ‘can I forget his tearless grief as he 
read the cabled message of sorrow. He sought com- 
fort in solitude, and went away to a quiet bay on 
the shore of New South Wales. A few Australian 
aborigines were living there. One morning, as he 
sat with bowed head listening to the mournful music 
of the sea, a hand was laid on his shoulder, and, in 
the strange accent of the aborigines, he heard the 
familiar words: Let not your heart be troubled; 
ye believe in God, believe also m Me. In my 
Father's house are many mansions; if 1t were not so 
I would have told you. He looked up and saw at 
his shoulder the wrinkled face of an old colored 


266 . A Casket of Cameos 


woman, shining with a heavenly light. She was 
God’s messenger to him. On the following Sunday 
he preached a sermon on Faith which those who 
heard will never forget.’ 

Poor Tom—the hero of Uncle Tom’s Cabin— 
would not object to being placed in the company of 
this Australian aboriginal. The two have much in 
common. ‘Tom is being carried by the slave-boat 
up the Mississippi. He has been sold. He looks 
back over the stern of the vessel and seems to see 
the old Kentucky farm with its shadowy beeches; 
seems to see the master’s house, with its wide cool 
halls; seems to see the little cabin overgrown with 
multiflora and bignonia. He seems, too, to see Aunt 
Chloe, his good wife, busy in her preparations for 
his evening meal; he seems to hear the merry laugh- 
ter of his boys at play; he seems to be listening to the 
chirrup of the baby at his knee. And then, with a 
start, it all fades, and the horrid reality rushes back 
upon him, ‘Is it strange,’ Mrs. Beecher Stowe asks, 
‘is it strange that some tears fall on the pages of 
his Bible as he lays it on the cotton-bale, and, with 
patient finger, threading its slow way from word 
to word, traces out its promises? Having learned 
late in life, Tom is but a slow reader, and passes 
on laboriously from verse to verse. Fortunate for 
him is it that the book on which he is intent is one 
which slow reading cannot injure; nay, one whose 
words, like ingots of gold, seem often to need to 
be weighed separately, that the mind may take in 


Dr. R. W. Dale’s Text 267 


their priceless value. Let us follow him a moment 
as, pointing to each word and pronouncing each 
half-aloud, he reads: 

‘Let—not—your—heart—be—troubled. In—my 
—Father’s—house—are—many—mansions. I—go 
—to—prepare—a—place—for—you,’ 

‘Cicero,’ adds Mrs. Stowe, “Cicero, when he buried 
his darling and only daughter, had a heart as full 
of honest grief as poor Tom’s; but Cicero could 
pause over no such sublime words of hope, and look 
to no such future reunion.’ 

Here, then; is our Australian aboriginal quoting, 
for the comfort of a strong man bowed down by his 
sorrow, the words that she has learned at the mis- 
sion-station. And, as a result, he rises, pulls him- 
self together, and, a few days later, preaches a 
sermon which fortifies the faith of all who hear it. 
And here is poor Uncle Tom, not dying but living, 
finding in the same rich cadences a tonic and an 
inspiration that brace him to face the bitter reali- 
ties of a slave’s existence. 

‘That steadied me, says Dr, Dale, with Death 
spreading his sable wings above him, ‘that steadied 
me, and I felt strong and safe m the love of 
Christ! 

‘That steadied me, says Uncle Tom, reeling under 
the bludgeonings of circumstance, ‘that steadied me, 
and I felt strong and safe in the love of Christ? 

Whether a man is looking into the face of Death 
or into the face of Life, it is all the same. In either 


268 A Casket of Cameos 


case, those words are equally precious. They are 
like ingots of gold, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe puts it. 
‘They are bonnie words! as Doctor Maclure ex- 
claims. ‘They are a great comfort, a very great 
comfort!’ as Sir Walter Scott sighs, gratefully. 
When Hugh Sutherland, the young tutor, told old 
David Elginbrod that he had just lost his father, 
the old man reached down the Bible and read the 
fourteenth of John as Hugh had never heard it 
read before. When he rose to go, David walked 
home in silence beside him. ‘The spirit of his 
father seemed to accompany them. Hugh felt that 
the sting of death had vanished—the sepulchre was 
clothed with green things and roofed with stars!’ 
Those golden words contain all the stimulus that a 
man needs in facing the stern realities of this life; 
they contain all the solace that he needs as he con- 
fronts the gathering shadows that haunt the portals 
of the life to come. 


IV 


The things that I most enjoy are the things that I 
find it most difficult to define. I cannot even describe 
my own delight in them. How can I set down in 
words the pleasure that [ find in the perfume of a 
violet, in the song of a thrush, or in the graceful 
poise of a deer? In the same way, how am [ to ex- 
plain the appeal that these majestic and gracious 
words make to my heart? It is impossible. I can 
expound neither the words themselves nor the emo- 


Dr. BR. W. Dale’s Text 269 


tions that they excite. I only know that the fra- 
grance of the violet is very sweet; that the song of 
the thrush is a rapture to the ear; that the dappled 
deer, standing with head erect and foot upraised, 
holds my eye entranced; and that the great words 
of the text, recited in my hour of need, flood all my 
soul with comfort and with courage. 

‘Let not your heart be ruffled, disturbed, dis- 
tracted,’ the Saviour says; ‘ye believe in God, be- 
lieve also in Me. It is such a mistake to set the 
one thought over against the other. 

‘I find it easy to believe in God,’ writes Cyril 
Makepeace, in a Jetter that the postman brought me 
not very long ago. ‘When,’ he goes on, ‘when I 
recite the creed, the first clause seems so perfectly 
natural and fitting: “J believe in God the Father 
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.’ How can 
I look at the universe around me without believing 
in God, the Maker of it all? But Jesus! “TI believe 
in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.” I find it 
very difficult, in my thought and devotion, to find 
room for the figure of Jesus—the pale Jew of a lone 
Syrian town—within the compass of my concep- 
tion of God.’ 

And, over against this feeling of Cyril Make- 
peace, I place the difficulty of Mary Fairfax. Mary 
came to me one evening in great trouble. 

‘It is so easy,’ she exclaimed, ‘to believe in Jesus. 
How can anybody read the New Testament without 
believing in Him? But God! Oh, how I wish that 


270 A Casket of Cameos 


I could really believe in God! To me, God is so 
incomprehensible. How can anybody love God?’ 

Poor Cyril Makepeace! Poor Mary Fairfax! 
‘Let not your heart be distracted by such distinc- 
tions,’ says the text. ‘If you can nestle your aching 
heads in the Father’s love, be glad; do not let the 
technicalities of the faith disturb your peace. If 
you find comfort in the thought of Jesus, make the 
most of it. “He that hath seen Me,’ He said Him- 
self, “hath seen the Father.’ Why set the two 
thoughts in antagonism in the day of tears?’ 

The heart and the intellect must not quarrel in the 
hour of grief. If the heart is in the sunshine, let 
the intellect range itself beside it and share the genial 
glow; if the mftellect sees the way shining through 
the gloom, let the heart unquestioningly follow! 
Let there be no clash, no discord, no inner turmoil. 
‘Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, 
believe also nm Me, 


"Twas the Master Himself who said it 
To the sorrowful little band, 

Facing an hour of darkness 
That they could not understand. 

The light of their lives was fading. 
Their eyes with tears were dim, 

The rugged men were shaken 
At the thought of losing Him. 


‘Let not your heart be troubled.’ 
Never was voice so sweet. 

Never was look more kingly, 
Nor assurance more complete. 


Dr. R. W. Dale’s Text 271 


‘Let not your heart be troubled, 
Ye believe in God Most High, 

And one with God the Father, 
Equal with Him am I,’ 


‘That steadied me, said Dr. Dale, ‘and I felt 
strong and safe in the love of Christ! With so 
brave a testimony on record, other staggering minds 
will know in which direction to look when the 
shadows close thickly about them. 














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